Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Three more anonymous postcards today, all with book-related facts.

Today in Scotland legislation came in to force that makes it compulsory to charge 5p to customers who wish to have a bag. The penalty for failing to charge for a bag is a £10,000 maximum fine. It might explain why I haven’t seen the rep from Marshall Wilson for quite a while. Marshall Wilson is a Glasgow-based company from whom we used to buy carrier bags. The rep would appear every quarter, although even before this legislation was first discussed I had noticed a steady decline in the number of customers asking for a bag and in the frequency of his visits. In 2001, when I bought the business, I didn’t even ask people if they wanted one – customers expected their books to be put in a carrier bag. Over the years, though, that has changed, and now when I ask customers if they would like a bag there is a more or less even split between those who do and those who do not. It will be interesting to see how this affects the demand for plastic bags. I feel a considerable degree of sympathy for the staff at Marshall Wilson, whose jobs are probably now on the line. I suppose a well-intentioned piece of legislation can have an unintended consequence on a small business whose trade is in such things. If the VAT rate on books rose from zero to 20 per cent, it would probably have a seriously detrimental effect on the trade in the same way that the 5p tax has impacted on the plastic bag industry.

Till total £250

23 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

The first customer of the day came in with a box of books to sell that included a copy of Biggles Takes it Rough .

Kate, the postie, brought today’s post at 11 a.m. It included two more anonymous postcards. I asked her if she could tell Wilma that the six sacks of random books are ready to pick up, and if she would mind asking the postman who collects the mail at the end of the day to drop in and collect them.

A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.

The postman appeared at 4.30 p.m. and collected the sacks for the Random Book Cub.

Just before I closed up there were two telephone calls, the first of them from a retired vicar in Durham with approximately a thousand books on theology. I have arranged to view them on Friday. The second call was from a woman whose parents lived in Newton Stewart. Her mother, a widow, died during the summer and the house is going on the market next week. She is up from London and has to have the books removed from the house by tomorrow evening.

Till total £166.99

17 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Nicky was in, so I drove to the book deal in the house in Newton Stewart shortly after she arrived. There was some good local history material. Clearing the house was obviously going to be a fairly onerous task; it was full of cheap furniture and had not seen a hoover for a year or two. Normally Nicky works Friday and Saturday, and once the summer students go back to university it is just me in the shop for the rest of the week, but she is very obliging and flexible, and will come in on other days too if I can’t schedule a book deal for Friday or Saturday.

Both Nicky and I keep forgetting to charge customers for carrier bags. We have resolved to rectify this by not even offering them a bag and leaving it up to them to ask.

Nicky took a telephone call from a man in Lochmaben with books to sell. I have scheduled him for Monday evening.

Till total £203.55

14 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 4

One of the missing orders this morning is called Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema . Bethan had listed it in the theology section.

I spent much of the day checking the prices of our antiquarian stock to make sure we were the cheapest online. In most cases, when we originally listed the books on Monsoon, we made sure that we undercut the competition, unless the only other copies were ex-library or in poor condition. If we sell our stock online at a fixed price, we make sure that we are the cheapest available. Only the cheapest copy will sell. Often we are undercut shortly afterwards, but unless we go back into the system and check, we have no way of knowing this, and if our copy is not the cheapest it will never sell. Most of our antiquarian stock has now been undercut, not just by other antiquarian copies but by Print on Demand copies. When a book is out of copyright, anyone is permitted to reprint it.

Until relatively recently this involved scanning or retyping the book and having a few hundred (or a few thousand) copies run off. This involved a cost, and also a financial risk, so most antiquarian books that were reprinted were local history books which the reprinters knew they could sell in their locale. In the first few years of this century, though, technology emerged by which anyone with a POD printer could print off single copies of out-of-print books at a relatively low cost. The consequence of this is that a search for a rare book on AbeBooks and many other web sites will throw up numerous cheap copies of books that do not exist until a customer orders them. It has driven the values of what were once rare books right down, as the seller is now competing in a market-place that is flooded with reprints, and we now rely on customers who want the original book for its own sake, rather than just for the information it contains. Couple this with the Google Books project, which plans to digitise and make free copies available of the 130 million or so unique titles that it has estimated exist in the history of publishing, and you have a lethal cocktail for those few of us left in the secondhand book trade.

Till total £852.50

9 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Nicky arrived with a substance that bore no resemblance to food. ‘Chocolate éclairs. Delicious.’ And so began another Foodie Friday.

At 9.15 a.m. I was about to head off to County Durham to look at the theology library when she remembered to tell me that the minister had telephoned on Wednesday to say that he had already sold them to another dealer.

Diana, Anna’s friend, emailed to say that Eva, her fourteen-year-old daughter, will be arriving in Dumfries on Monday afternoon for a week’s work experience. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to take her on for the week, but I remember her being a very charming girl, so hopefully it will work out well.

A customer asked me if I could help her find Christmas presents for her four daughters, but she couldn’t tell me what they were interested in or what her budget was, and since I have never met her children I had no idea what to suggest, although I was extremely grateful that she had decided to buy their Christmas presents in a second-hand bookshop. I recommended Philip Pullman and C. S. Lewis, both of whose works seem to have a broad appeal.