Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Till total £447.98

44 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky, Bethan and Flo were all in today. Flo is a student who worked in the shop last summer, and is admirably disrespectful to customers, but considerably more so to me. It would have been handier to have them all in over the weekend, and I struggled to find things for them all to do.

The Writers’ Retreat was fairly quiet, except when Clare Balding was in. I spent most of the day filling the log basket and taking bin bags full of lobster carcasses and paper plates and bottles out of the kitchen and down to the bins.

Nicky brought me in some homeopathic stress relief pills and made me take two, washed down with a pint of her vile home brew.

Till total £467.12

51 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Bethan and Flo in, though Bethan missed the bus and didn’t appear until 10 a.m. Flo failed to find one of the orders this morning, Tokyo Lucky Hole , in the erotica section, and another in the poetry section. I found both in about a minute and asked her to package them. When I returned about ten minutes later, she was engrossed in the fairly graphically erotic Tokyo Lucky Hole.

In the evening Allison, Anna, Lee Randall and I formed a team for Stuart Kelly’s Literary Pub Quiz. We came third, with 25 out of 35. Anupa came back to the house afterwards for a few drinks.

Till total £291.49

27 customers

First edition snobs are, sadly, a dying breed, although many people who bring books into the shop in the hope of selling them will point to the verso of the title page, where the edition is displayed, and expectantly await an offer of untold wealth. Now, I rarely check the edition unless it is a pre-1960 Ian Fleming, or a well-known author’s first title or something similar. In non-fiction – with a few exceptions – it barely makes any difference what edition a book is, yet people still cling to the notion that first editions are somehow imbued with a magical and financial value. Textbooks are something we don’t even bother with in the shop these days. Every year they appear to be very slightly revised and republished. Students (oriental in Orwell’s case, of every kind in mine) are expected to be armed with the latest edition, rendering all previous editions essentially worthless. Commonest of all these days are not ‘vague-minded women’ but men trying to track down a particular title. Their disappointment at being told that we don’t happen to have a copy in stock is matched only by their sense of smug satisfaction on hearing that information. Should the quest for their holy grail ever be completed, many of them would have no further purpose in life. By far the favourite is the search for an odd volume to make up a complete set of something. It has to be the same edition, same binding, same colour. Most booksellers don’t stock odd volumes unless it is a particularly interesting title, or a volume with fine illustrations, so the benighted crusader searching for his missing third volume of Gordon’s The Works of Tacitus (fourth edition, Rivington, London, 1770, tree-calf, five raised bands, purple title panel) can be confident that his quest will continue until he can no longer remember what he was looking for.

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Nicky and Flo both in today.

Today was my forty-fourth birthday, so at lunchtime I went to Rigg Bay for a swim in the sea with Anna to mark the occasion in the same way that I have done for the past thirteen years.

The Writers’ Retreat was unusually busy by lunchtime for a weekday. Among the retreating writers were the journalist Allan Little and Richard Demarco, who must be in his eighties now. Richard was instrumental in setting up the Edinburgh Festival, and Allan, who grew up in the west of Galloway, was one of the BBC’s finest journalists. At its busiest time there must have been thirty people in the room, at which point Maria, who was bringing in a tray of food, spotted something on the floor that looked suspiciously faecal. She quietly gestured to Laurie, who came over, and they hatched a plan for her to find a cloth and remove it before anyone else saw it. Maria discreetly stood over it to ensure that nobody trod in it. As she was guarding it, Allison marched into the room, saw it, pointed at it and said, ‘Oh look, a shit!’ before Laurie had the chance to remove it.

The source of the shit became the subject of discussion for the rest of the day, Nicky leading the investigation with forensic scrutiny, which included rifling through the bin to retrieve it so that she could measure it. She became increasingly convinced that an elderly visitor had done it without noticing, and that it had slipped down their trouser leg. Other theories included the suggestion that it was actually icing from my birthday cake, which Anna had made. When Stuart suggested that the turd may have been Captain’s, Nicky’s instant and vituperative response was, ‘Nae chance, the bore’s wrong’.

The interview recorded earlier in the month with Border TV was broadcast on their magazine programme Border Life . Mercifully, I missed it.

Till total £395.93

45 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Flo and Nicky in.

I spent most of the day editing a promotional video about Wigtown that I’ve been putting together purely because of the diabolical lack of attention that Visit Scotland pays to this corner of the country. For decades it has been referred to as ‘Scotland’s Forgotten Corner’, and many visitors appreciate that element of it, but it ill-becomes our publicly funded tourist agency to forget it. On the Visit Scotland web site, under the blurb about Wigtown, there is a photograph of the golf course at Glenluce, twelve miles away. It really can’t be that difficult to find a picture of Wigtown. I have even emailed them one of my own, but they have yet to substitute it and probably never will.

Lunched with two Italian women – journalists who were over because they had read Anna’s book and wanted to visit Wigtown. I am quite convinced that Rockets has done far more for tourism in Wigtown than Visit Scotland ever will.

Nicky and I did a slot on Wigtown Radio between 3 and 4 p.m. Unfortunately someone had muted the music on the computer, so Nicky had to keep talking until I worked out how to fix it, which took about half an hour. She dried up a few times and was clearly not enjoying it, but she did a decent job of presenting. As soon as her shift was over, she left the cell and demanded whisky.

The comedian Robin Ince arrived at about 6 p.m. He wanted to browse in the shop, so I put all the lights back on and left him to it. He bought a pile of books. Nicky and I went to his event in the County Buildings at 7.30 p.m.

I posted the video of Wigtown that I had been editing on Facebook.

Till total £319.05

40 customers

Online orders: 3