Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

There has been a noticeable decrease in the numbers of people asking for bags, although English customers often look quite affronted when asked for 5p. I suspect that they are unaware that it is now a legal requirement and think they are being fleeced by greedy Scots.

A retired teacher from the nearby seaside village of Garlieston dropped in a few boxes of books, mainly book club fiction in poor condition, but I found a handful of interesting equestrian books on trap racing and gave him £20 for them.

Finished Kidnapped. It was a relatively early edition in a pictorial binding, so I put it back on the shelf. It is a title that always sells quickly.

Till total £149.39

16 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop.

Captain spent the afternoon sleeping in an empty cardboard box in the Scottish room, to the delight of the customers.

Till total £170.99

12 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Nicky in again, and Kate the postie delivered three more anonymous postcards.

The telephone rang at 9.05 a.m.

Me: ‘Good morning, The Book Shop.’

Caller: ‘Oh, hello. Are you open today?’

The first customer of the day was a man with an extremely ill-advised Rolf Harris beard and high-handed tone: ‘Do you have any Folio Society books? You have heard of the Folio Society, haven’t you?’ This is tantamount to asking a farmer if he knows what a tractor is, so I told him that, yes, I have heard of the Folio Society, and have a stock of about 300 books published by them. He bought two of the most beautifully illustrated of the Folio titles, Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies . As he left, he apologised for his earlier tone, explaining that the last three bookshops he had been in had no idea what the Folio Society was.

After lunch I drove to Dumfries for an appointment with the back specialist at 3.15 p.m., then picked up Eva from the railway station. She is here until Friday. Once I had picked her up we drove to Lochmaben to look at books in a bungalow. The books were mainly slasher crime fiction paperbacks. The man was selling the books as his wife had advanced cancer, and he was moving her into a care home. He had bought a small flat so that he could be close to her, but there wasn’t enough space for the books. I gave him £40 for about sixty books.

In the van on the way home Eva was curious to find out about acquiring stock, and what factors determine which books I buy and how much I offer for them. I did my best to explain, but it caused me to reflect on quite how complex the process is. There are no rules, other than those you make for yourself.

I emailed Flo this morning to see if she can come in tomorrow for a few hours, just so that Eva has some company nearer her own age. I have arranged for her to work in the festival office on Wednesday (Anna’s suggestion) by way of a change of scene.

Till total £205.90

27 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Eva eventually appeared at about 11 a.m. As with all new members of staff, I asked her to go around the shop and tidy the shelves to familiarise herself with the layout of the shop.

Kate the postie delivered a postcard this morning with this on the back: ‘Do not go gently into that good night, another double Scotch should see you right.’ The anonymous postcard trend seems to be gathering momentum. The postmark was Edinburgh.

Flo turned up at about 3 p.m. and taught Eva a few bad habits, including the importance of being rude to me and ignoring all of my instructions. Fortunately, Eva seems to be far too polite and well brought up to follow Flo’s feral example.

Till total £314.46

30 customers

Online orders: 1

Books found: 1

Eva spent the day in the festival office. She came back at lunchtime exhausted from a morning of data entry, then headed back to an afternoon of more of the same. When she came back to the shop at 5 p.m., she told me that she had ‘nearly slipped into a boredom coma’.

Kate the postie delivered four more anonymous postcards.

A customer looking for books on dogs kept talking over me as I attempted to direct her to the right section. I finally gave up and timed how long it took for her to stop talking. Two minutes and forty-three seconds.

After I closed the shop, I went for a walk with Eva to show her some of the more interesting parts of the town, including the martyrs’ graves, the medieval well and the monument on Windy Hill.

Till total £106

26 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 4

Today’s post brought four more anonymous postcards, including one quoting from The Meaning of Liff , a book in which Douglas Adams and John Lloyd took an assortment of British place-names and ascribed them meanings, as though in a dictionary. One of the postcards today read: ‘Moranjie (adj.) Faintly nervous that a particular post box “won’t work” when posting an important letter.’ But I think my favourite definition in The Meaning of Liff is ‘Mavis Enderby (n.) The almost-completely-forgotten girlfriend from your distant past for whom your wife has a completely irrational jealousy and hatred.’

Shortly after I had opened the shop, a family of five came in. The father – wearing a baseball cap and drinking a can of Tizer – wandered about muttering ‘ferret books’ repeatedly to himself. I had no idea it was still possible to buy Tizer.

At about 1 p.m., as I was sitting at the counter chatting to Eva, a large man came into the room from the back of the shop with his wife and headed towards the front door. As they were leaving, the wife asked him, ‘Are you going to buy anything?’, to which he replied, ‘No, I haven’t seen anything I like.’ Eva stared at me in open-mouthed disbelief, then told me that he had been sitting in the armchair by the fire since 10 a.m. working his way through a large pile of books that he had accumulated. Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered putting any of them back on the shelves, a task that Eva and I split evenly once he had left.

Eva’s mother emailed this morning asking if she could come home tonight because they are unexpectedly going away for a few days, so I telephoned Flo and asked if she could cover the shop for the afternoon – her first time locking up. Amazingly, she didn’t make a mess of it. I drove Eva to Dumfries in time to catch the 5.58 p.m. train. Sad to see her leave; she was splendid company to have in the house as the winter draws in and I am left alone with the cat.

Till total £292.99

32 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Nicky in.

This morning Kate the postie delivered a Halloween anonymous postcard bearing the message that ‘Ray Bradbury was a descendant of one of the Salem witches.’ I asked Nicky to judge the postcards that had come in this week and pick a winner. She took it much more seriously than I had anticipated, going so far as to devise a system based on five criteria:

1. She had to understand the quotation on the back.

2. The picture on the card had to relate to the quotation on the back.

3. The card had to be recycled.

4. It had to make her laugh.

5. The quotation had to have some sort of reference to literature.

Just before closing, Mr Deacon appeared with two women who I would guess were about half his age. This time he was not looking quite so smartly dressed, and his shirt appeared to have acquired an impressive new tapestry of stains. I assume he wears the same shirt for funerals as he does for gardening. He bought a copy of Antonia Fraser’s King Charles II , then introduced his companions, who, it transpired, were his daughters. They had both seen the video of the shooting of the Kindle, as had Mr Deacon, much to my surprise. I didn’t imagine that he owned a single piece of technology, and that was why he bought books through me rather than Amazon or AbeBooks, but it appears that he is pretty au fait with computers – he just prefers to support local shops. Prior to meeting his daughters, I had assumed that Mr Deacon was a bachelor, and this tiny insight into his life somehow seemed like a sweeping canvas of information, compared with what little I knew about him before.