Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Ronnie the electrician turned up when the shop was full of customers and started loudly describing the various ways in which we could blow up Kindles. He has a disconcertingly comprehensive knowledge of bomb-making. I will probably go for a sugar/sodium chlorate mix, although he seems quite keen to try an oxyacetylene bomb. Customers who arrived half-way through the conversation gave him a wide berth.

Quiet day compared with yesterday.

Till total £72.30

11 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Flo was in today. She seems to have mastered her pout, and spent most of the day demonstrating it.

When I was at the counter, an old traveller man who had not been in the shop for years arrived with a coffee table that had been made to look like two giant books. He wanted £60 for it. We settled on £35. The last time I saw him (about ten years ago) he came in and asked for a copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies . My father was in the shop at the time and instantly recognised him. Apparently he’d ‘bought’ scrap machinery from Dad about thirty years ago, when he was farming, but had never returned to pay him. He asked me if I had a copy of a book he was looking for, and when I replied, ‘Yes, The Tinkler-Gypsies ’, he looked quite taken aback. The Tinkler-Gypsies is a book written by a lawyer from Newton Stewart called Andrew McCormick in 1906. It is a detailed account of the Galloway traveller community at the time and a valuable historical and social record. For a while copies would quickly sell for over £100 and were snapped up, but I see that it is now available as an e-book, which means that values have probably crashed.

Ecotricity, the company behind the proposed wind farm, have appealed to the Scottish government to have the council’s decision to reject it overturned.

Till total £382.32

30 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

In the inbox today was an email from Stuart Kelly, to which he attached the following rejection letter from a friend of his who had applied for a job in a bookshop:

Dear XXX,

We have too many people here. That they are all idiots is neither here nor there. I like them. They are firm, and peachy bottomed. I pay them £3 an hour. As a man with ambitions to enter the world of publishing, where artistic talent is sucked dry for profit, I imagine this sort of wage won’t appeal.

One of them now is prattling about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Do I care? No, I do not. But I am fond of her. She pulls her weight. She ‘mucks in’, so to speak. Would you muck in? I doubt it. I think you’d run away to Italy and live out your life in indolence and drunkenness.

PROVE ME WRONG. COME IN AND WORK FOR FREE FOR MONTHS ON END WHILST RECEIVING ABUSE, SOME OF IT SEXUAL. YOU WILL WEAR A DUNCE’S CAP, AND A LOINCLOTH, AND BE FORCED TO EAT RAW SHRIMP, DAY IN, DAY OUT. DO YOU _LOVE_ THE SECOND HAND BOOK INDUSTRY ENOUGH TO HACK IT? WELL DO YOU? This is what we call an ‘internship’. It looks good on CVs.

I suppose we’ll see.

Yours,

XXX

Another anonymous postcard arrived in the post this morning. This one reads: ‘The Bookshop has a thousand books, all colours, hues and tinges, and every cover is a door that turns on magic hinges.’ I suspect that posting the first one on the shop’s Facebook page last week may well trigger even more of them.

Mr Deacon’s book arrived, so I called to let him know.

Till total £309.49

26 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 1

Nicky appeared just a moment after I had opened the shop and thrust what at first glance looked like something from a hospital clinical waste bin under my nose. It was fleshy and covered in what appeared to be blood. ‘It’s a jam doughnut from the Morrison’s skip. It got a bit squashed in the back of the van. Try it, they’re delicious.’ It was even more revolting than it looked. ‘It’s Foodie Friday,’ she reminded me.

As we were chatting about what to do for the day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Smelly Kelly, her irrepressible suitor, or had my nostrils assaulted by the lingering stench of Brut 33 for a while. I asked Nicky if she had seen him recently, to which she nonchalantly replied, ‘Did you not hear? He died three weeks ago.’

Three people turned up with boxes of books to sell today, including a very tall, well-spoken man in his seventies who arrived with seventeen large plastic crates full of all sorts of books, including one illustrated and signed by Aubrey Beardsley. I gave him £800 for them.

We were chatting about families, and he told me that his had been extremely wealthy until his great-grandfather lost everything on ‘drink, gambling and women’. His grandfather became the first male heir in generations to be forced to secure a proper job, so he went to Cambridge and became a gynaecologist. Because the family was well connected, he ended up becoming gynaecologist to the royal family: ‘He was Queen Mary’s cunt mechanic.’

Two more anonymous postcards. One read: ‘Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate’, while the other read: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.’ The second seemed vaguely familiar, so I googled it. It is by Seamus Heaney in ‘An Open Letter’ , and is his brilliantly petulant response to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry .

After the festival every year Anna and I have a night away in a hotel of a better standard than we would normally enjoy. This year Anna chose Glenapp Castle, near Ballantrae, so we left the shop at lunchtime and headed over there. I spent much of the afternoon lying on an enormous bed reading Kidnapped.

Nicky will open the shop tomorrow.

Till total £228.44

21 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop this morning. Anna and I returned from Glenapp at about lunchtime.

A customer came in with four bags of books, mainly rubbish, but they included a book called Once a Customer, Always a Customer , which I suspect he put in there deliberately to annoy me.

At 4 p.m. an unusually smart-looking Mr Deacon appeared to pick up his book. I commented that he was looking quite sharp, to which he simply replied ‘Funeral’ on his way out of the shop.

A couple with a young boy came in and bought books. The boy spotted Nicky’s notice inviting customers to be filmed reading from their favourite book and asked if he could read from his. He was seven and called Oscar. He read very clearly from a Harry Potter book, and afterwards Nicky asked him if he was reading anything now, to which he replied ‘ To Kill a Mockingbird ’ . Nicky was visibly impressed, and his parents looked justifiably proud. They explained that, although there are elements of it that are not particularly suitable for child to be reading, they didn’t think that he was old enough to understand the full implications of the ‘crime’ for which Tom Robinson was being tried. Apparently Oscar had asked if he could read it.

Till total £245.49

19 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Nicky came in today so that I could drive Anna to Dumfries to catch the train to London for meetings. After that, she will fly to America to work on a film for which one of her friends has raised the funding. On returning to the shop I discovered that the traveller who had sold me the giant book-shaped coffee table had been back in for our copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies . He had asked for a discount, but Nicky refused to budge on the price.