Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

A customer picked up a copy of a Lyn Andrews book and announced to her friend, ‘I am reading that on me Kindle at the moment.’ I sincerely hope she stumbled across my mutilated trophy Kindle and considered the potential implications that the e-readers might have on bookshops, but I genuinely doubt that her mind is particularly troubled by thoughts of any nature.

At lunchtime a customer with his left trouser leg rolled up to his knee and his right one at his ankle, and a flat cap, bought a book about tantric sex.

At Anna’s insistence I printed off ‘Missing Cat’ posters and distributed them about the town.

Supper with friends in the Isle of Whithorn, which largely consisted of loud arguments about the independence referendum. Anna, who initially had been against independence because of her understandable dislike of nationalism (her maternal grandparents were both Holocaust survivors; her grandfather was a prisoner in Auschwitz when it was liberated), seems to be coming around to the idea that nationalism and independence are not necessarily the same thing. Half of us at supper were pro-independence, the other half against it. If the result on the day is as evenly split as we were, then it should make for an interesting night as the votes are counted on the 18th.

One of the unlikely outcomes of the evening was a discussion about poetry. Christopher, our host, is a farmer who read pure mathematics at university, and the last person I would have suspected to have a passion for poetry. I have known him all my life, but until tonight I had no idea that he had even the slightest interest in anything other than rainfall statistics and crop yields. Tonight he recited Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by heart. It was extraordinary and surprisingly moving.

Till total £239

17 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Nicky couldn’t come in today, so I emailed Bethan and told her that she was welcome to work if she was free.

Our Amazon rating has dropped from Good to Fair, probably due to unfulfilled orders. Of today’s orders, one was sent to Belgium and another to Germany. This usually happens when sterling is weak, which it is at the moment, in part – so the anti-independence campaigners say – due to uncertainty caused by the referendum on Thursday.

Bethan turned up at about 1 p.m. I showed her around the shop and started her on tidying shelves, which has the twin benefits of making the shop look smarter and teaching her where the various sections are in the shop.

Shortly after Bethan arrived, Anupa, one of the festival artists in residence, dropped in for a cup of tea. I was desperately trying to catch up with a backlog of jobs, but we chatted for an hour or so anyway. We discussed Thursday’s vote, and the possibility that when we next meet, in a week or so, it might be in an independent Scotland. If nothing else, at least the co-op will be open again.

A shuffling old man with a beard asked for books on ‘Cumbriana and Northumbriana’, further fuelling my dislike of people who try to make themselves sound more intelligent by using unnecessary words. Philately will get you nowhere in The Book Shop. A few minutes later he returned, unable to find the topography section, and asked ‘Where’s Northumbria?’ Resisted the urge to tell him that it is just south of Scotland. His wife came to the counter with seven books on Northumbria, including a mint first edition Highways and Byways. The total was £27. He looked at the floor and mumbled, ‘What’s your best price?’

Till total £211.17

28 customers

Online orders: 1

Books found: 1

Bethan was in again this morning, so I spent most of the day building the ‘creative space’ in the old warehouse for Allison’s puppet show during the festival. Last year I converted part of the warehouse into a sort of clubby drawing room, and we advertised it as The Festival Club. Maria, who catered for the whisky supper back in the Spring Festival, supplied food, tea, wine, beer and soft drinks, and it was an enormous success. But this year Maria is catering for the Writers’ Retreat during the festival, and we haven’t been able to find a replacement caterer, so it is being used as an events venue, mainly for Allison.

A woman arrived in the shop at 4 p.m., wiping blood from her arm. She was convinced that she had found Captain near the tennis court and had tried to bring him back to the shop, but when she got to the co-op the cat started scratching her and hissing, then ran away.

In the afternoon I did a short interview with Border TV about the impending book festival. Life in Galloway, with its thinly spread population, often involves being badly served by things that other people take for granted, such as public transport, but nothing quite encapsulates this epic failure in the way that our local television station does. They do their best, but Galloway is not part of the Borders, and our ‘local’ television station is broadcast from the far coast of another country. Gateshead, the headquarters of ITV Border, is in England and nearly 200 miles from the west of Galloway. This would be analogous to London’s local news being broadcast from Swansea and attempting to cover everything in between the two places.

Till total £152.49

13 customers

Online orders: 0

Books found: 0

Bethan was in again today.

As we were going through the last of the boxes from the Haugh of Urr deal, Bethan came across a copy of The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine . Ordinarily I would expect to know little or nothing about most of the authors whose works are on our shelves, but Kathleen Raine is someone whom I learned a little about when I was buying books from an elderly man who lived near Penpont, about forty miles from Wigtown. Six years ago he had telephoned me to tell me that he was selling his books, so I drove to his house – an attractive laird’s house with an Andy Gold-sworthy sculpture in the garden. Before I started to work my way through his substantial library, we sat down to a pot of soup which he had made, and over which he explained that he had recently been diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. He was clearly struggling to accept the diagnosis, repeatedly telling me that two years previously, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he had climbed Kilimanjaro. His wife had died some years ago, and he had obviously expected to live considerably longer than the medical experts had now told him he could reasonably expect. There was a clear and understandable sense of injustice and anger in his language. Of his library of about six thousand books I bought about 800, and paid him £1,200. The most interesting thing among it was a letter to him from Kathleen Raine, which he had used as a bookmark in Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water . When he produced this and showed it to me, I had to confess that I had never heard of Kathleen Raine, so he explained that she and Maxwell had been good friends until, during a visit to Camusfearna (his home at Sandaig on the west coast of Scotland), he banished her from the house during a storm in 1956. Raine cursed Maxwell under a rowan tree in the garden. She blamed all his subsequent misfortunes – which were swift and many – on this curse and believed that Maxwell’s friends also blamed her for the series of disasters that befell him. The letter in the copy of Ring of Bright Water was a reply to an invitation to the opening of the Gavin Maxwell memorial at Monreith, near where Maxwell grew up. Raine turned down the invitation because she believed that Maxwell’s friends would be hostile towards her. The elderly man died within a few months of selling me his books.