Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Very quiet in the shop. Not a single customer after 11.45 a.m., apart from Mr Deacon. The day was saved by an online order for the two-volume set of Don Quixote I bought on 15 August from the cottage in Haugh of Urr. It made £400 and sold to a customer in Japan.

Till total £152.50

5 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

No postcards today.

Nicky has asked if she can have my Facebook password so that she can update the thousand or so people who follow the status updates from her perspective. She has also told me that there is a bit of the new counter area that Callum has built that she doesn’t like and she’s going to remove it the next time I’m away. As always, there was a complete absence of any rational explanation as to why she has taken exception to that particular bit of the counter: ‘I just dinnae like it.’

The winner of last week’s anonymous postcard competition (the prize is a book of their choice, value up to £20) was from London, and the card read: ‘“Do you know Yeats? The wine lodge? No, W. B. Yeats, the poet…” and so to assonance, getting the rhyme wrong.’ Apparently it is a quotation from Willy Russell, who came to the book festival a few years ago.

Isabel came in to do the accounts. She was very taken with the new book spirals.

I reached the point in Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father in which he quotes from the letter I gave him. My surname is often spelled incorrectly, but Andrew’s interpretation of it is very unusual: ‘Bithyll’.

Till total £88

5 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

A significant number of customers recently have been asking for Terry Pratchett novels. His sad decline with Alzheimer’s may well have something to do with it. Pratchett, like John Buchan, P. G. Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and many others, is an author whose books I can never find enough of. They sell quickly and usually in large numbers. In one day last year we sold our entire Penguin Wodehouse section of over twenty books, all bought by three customers.

Till total £198.77

15 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Reasonably busy day – spent much of it reading Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father, Ian Niall: Part of His Life. Ian Niall was John McNeillie’s nom de plume , and the title is a reference to his father’s most famous work, The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life.

Till total £132.83

17 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

A customer at 11.15 a.m. asked for a copy of Far from the Maddening Crowd . In spite of several attempts to explain that the book’s title is actually Far from the Madding Crowd , he resolutely refused to accept that this was the case, even when the overwhelming evidence of a copy of it was placed on the counter under his nose: ‘Well, the printers have got that wrong.’

Despite the infuriating nature of this exchange, I ought to be grateful: he has given me an idea for the title of my autobiography should I ever be fortunate enough to retire.

I have stapled the anonymous postcards along one of the shelves in the gallery, the room in the middle of the shop that used to be used for hanging paintings in the time when John Carter owned the place. We still call it the gallery, despite the fact that there isn’t a single painting there. Similarly, there is a pub in Wigtown which for a hundred years at least was known as The County Hotel. When it was taken over about six years ago, the new owners changed the name to The Wigtown Ploughman. Locals still refer to it as The County, and I suspect they always will.

Till total £57.99

6 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

I am rapidly running out of space for the anonymous postcards and may have to start stapling them to Nicky.

A customer came to the counter with Highways and Byways in Galloway and Carrick , by C. H. Dick, published in 1916 and bound in blue buckram with gilt titles. This copy was in fine condition and priced at £16.50. When I asked her for the money, the customer – an elderly, well-spoken woman – spat ‘£16.50? That’s daylight robbery, I am not paying that for an old book.’ I followed her to the door and watched as she got into her brand-new Range Rover and drove off.

Highways and Byways is a truly wonderful glimpse of the area a hundred years ago. Surprisingly little has changed around here since then. Particularly the fact that – as Dick observed – the ‘district has remained unknown to the world longer than any other part of Scotland, with the possible exception of the island of Rockall’.

Till total £125.03

7 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

One of the online orders was for the Penguin edition of Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza , a book I hadn’t even realised we had in stock.

Just before lunch a customer brought in four boxes of grubby trashy fiction. I fished out a few and offered him £15 for them. He proceeded to complain that £15 wouldn’t even cover the cost of the petrol he used to drive here with them. When I pointed out that I neither asked him to bring them here nor even knew that he was going to, he continued to complain until he finally left, muttering that he had a large library of rare antiquarian books that he ‘most certainly won’t be bringing to this establishment to sell’.

Winter is really setting in, and the shop is noticeably colder than it was a few weeks ago, despite the heating being on and the stove in the shop having been lit every day since the start of October.

Till total £67.95

7 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 2

Ran down the stairs at 8.55 a.m. to answer the telephone, which had been ringing for a while. En route I managed to spill tea all over my crotch. I reached the telephone to be asked, ‘Do you know what time the next bus for Wigtown leaves Newton Stewart?’

Wrote grovelling apologies to the two Amazon customers whose orders I couldn’t find, in the hope of avoiding negative feedback.

As I was attempting to put up a poster up in the shop for the Random Book Club, I noticed that the staple gun didn’t appear to be working, so I tested it on my hand, at which point it decided to work.

Till total £34.50

3 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 3

Nicky arrived, bright and early with some hideous flapjacks from the Morrisons skip. She hijacked Facebook and posted the following:

Todays Offers!

Always wanted that copy of ‘The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology’ with it’s hand coloured Marlow Buzz, Little Yellow May Dun etc but you just did not have £70 to spare – well this weekend it could be yours! Let’s BARTER!

Firewood, whisky, hens, piebald cobs all taken in part exchange! Bring ’em in!

A small boy, probably five years old, came in on his own and asked if we could help him find a birthday present for his mother. He had £4. On inquiring, we discovered that she likes gardening, so we found him a book on container gardening priced at £6. Nicky let him have it for £4.

After lunch I drove to Rhonehouse, near Castle Douglas, to look at a book collection that a retired Church of Scotland minister’s widow was selling. I arrived at 2 p.m. and met her and her son, a man a few years younger than I am who had moved back from Edinburgh to help look after her in old age. She made us all a cup of tea, then showed me to the dining room, in which she had laid out all the books – spine up – on the dining table. As she was discussing them she produced an extremely loud whistling fart, which she sustained over a period of several seconds. Shortly afterwards she left and wandered off into the garden, at which point her son entered the room, clearly detected the fart and shot me the filthiest of looks.