Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Till total £5

1 customer

Online orders: 15

Books found: 14

Cold, dark and miserable day today; driving rain all day. Eliot was in the bath between 8.15 a.m. and 9 a.m., so I missed the opportunity to brush my teeth or wash prior to opening the shop.

In contrast to the weather, Nicky was irksomely bright and cheery all day. We discussed listing books for Fulfilled By Amazon, a service offered by Amazon whereby we list and label books on our database then send them up to their Dunfermline warehouse, where they are stored until ordered by a customer. Amazon’s staff will then pick and pack the titles as the orders come in. It solves the problem of lack of space in the shop and is particularly useful when a collection on a subject that might not be a good seller in the shop comes in. Nicky steadfastly refuses to list on FBA, based on a series of questionable judgements that stray into areas of morality and other irrelevant fields of philosophy. I do not fully understand, or even partly understand, why Nicky objects so strongly to FBA, other than that it is a transaction involving Amazon, through whom we already sell some of our shop stock. Very few booksellers think anything positive about Amazon, but it is, sadly, the only shop in town when it comes to online selling. I’ve given up on trying to reason with her: she nods helpfully at my suggestions and requests, then ploughs on doing exactly as she did before with no regard whatsoever to anything I’ve said.

We spent part of the morning setting up a Winter Olympics window display in the non-leaking window using the pair of 1920s Lillywhites wooden skis that I bought at the auction yesterday. The other window is still full of pans and mugs collecting water from the leaks.

At lunchtime Anna and I drove to Newton Stewart, from where she caught the bus to Dumfries, then the train back to London.

At 2 p.m. a man with a Mugabe-style moustache brought in two boxes of books on art and the cinema. He had his eye on a few books in the shop, so we agreed on £30 credit for the books he brought in. This is an almost daily occurrence and is one of the ways we acquire stock, other than house clearances. Most days at least one person will come in to sell books, and about 100 books a day come into the shop this way. Normally, we reject about 70 per cent of them, but more often than not the person bringing them in will want to leave the entire lot. This creates a problem with the shop filling up with boxes of books that we don’t want. Usually we pay cash for books brought into the shop, as the quantities do not require recourse to the chequebook. For these transactions we have a handsome Victorian ledger in which the seller has to enter their name, address and the amount, so that we can keep the books balanced.

Once, not long after I had bought the shop, a young man who was emigrating to Canada brought in several boxes of books to sell. When I asked him to sign the cashbook, he wrote ‘Tom Jones’. I laughed and pointed out a few other names that were clearly made up but that he was the first to use Tom Jones, to which he replied ‘It’s not unusual’ and left. When I started to price up his books, I noticed that there, on the endpaper of every book, written in biro, was the name Tom Jones. His taste in books was very similar to mine, although there were a few that I hadn’t yet read. Assuming that I would like those too, I fished out half a dozen and put them aside to read later. One of them was The Ascent of Rum Doodle , W. E. Bowman’s classic spoof of climbing literature.

Till total £104.90

8 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Eliot left for London at 2 p.m.

A young woman and her mother spent most of the afternoon in the shop. The mother seemed well prepared for the temperature, but the daughter appeared to be oblivious to the near-freezing conditions. She chatted breezily away as she was paying, and told me that her name was Lauren McQuistin, and she was training to be an opera singer. She seemed vaguely familiar; must have been in before. She bought an impressive pile of fairly highbrow material and suggested that I read Any Human Heart . Possibly the most recommended book I have been advised to read is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. I tend to avoid anything that is recommended to me, preferring naively to imagine that I will dig my own literary goldmine, but so compelling was her enthusiasm that after supper I lit the wood-burning stove and began to read it. By bedtime I was completely hooked.

Till total £13

2 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

If anyone can be said to be a Wigtown institution, it is Vincent. He has been here as long as anyone can remember, although he spent his childhood on the Clyde. He is universally liked, and is interesting and mischievous. There is a rumour that he was educated at Cambridge, but as far as I am aware, nobody has been able to substantiate this. He must be in his eighties, but he still works long hours – longer than any of his mechanics. Vincent’s garage was once a Renault dealership, from which he sold new cars. Indeed, the old showroom is still there, with all the faded and cracked Renault branding on it, but now, instead of shiny new cars, his fleet consists of vehicles that, to put it politely, have seen better days. Once, when a botanist friend was visiting, we went there to fill the van with diesel. My friend leapt excitedly out of the van and headed towards one of Vincent’s fleet, which had been parked outside the showroom with four flat tyres since I have been back in Wigtown. He pointed at a fern that was growing inside the wheel arch and identified it as something quite rare.

After lunch I drove to a farm near Stranraer to give a probate valuation on some books. I was met by a damp, taciturn farmer in a tweed cap who instructed me to follow him on his quad bike, complete with a miserable collie perched precariously on the back, barking at the van all the way. We soon arrived at a desolate-looking farmhouse in the hollow of a muddy hillside, made all the more awful by the incessant, horizontal rain.

Inside, he explained that the house had belonged to his uncle and aunt. She had died five years previously and the uncle two years ago. It was clear that nothing had been touched since then, or in fact probably in the five years since his aunt had died. A lonely-looking cat lay on a blanket on a radiator by the window and stared out across the flooded fields. The farmer went up every day to empty the litter tray and feed it. Everything was covered in dust and cat hair. There were about two thousand books, crammed into every nook and cranny, including a pile on every step of the stairs. The aunt was the reader. L. M. Montgomery, Star Trek, Agatha Christie, Folio Society and a lot of children’s books, including many complete runs. Most were paperbacks and not in particularly good condition, thanks in part to the cat. I valued the lot at £300, and he asked if I would consider buying them once he had discussed it with his family. I told him that I would, but that a lot of it was rubbish. He replied that if he decided to sell them to me, it would be conditional on the entire lot being taken away.

When I returned to the shop at 3 p.m., I was immediately accosted by a customer who marched up to the counter without the slightest of pleasantries and barked, ‘Gold markings.’ I sighed inside and explained where the jewellery section was.

Till total £307.50

4 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

Yet another miserable day, which did not improve at 9.10 a.m., when the telephone rang: ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. I don’t know how you have the nerve to call yourself a bookseller, sending out this sort of rubbish’, etc. He continued in this vein for several minutes. On further questioning, it transpired that he had ordered a book from a shop with a similar name (not unusual, as Tom Jones so wisely said), and he was not happy with the condition it was in. When it became clear that he’d telephoned the wrong bookshop and that the whole affair was nothing to do with us, he told me that he would be ‘taking the matter further’, then hung up.