Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

I left with four boxes of crusty theology and a reputation for flatulence.

Till total £105.90

11 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Nicky stayed overnight and opened the shop this morning.

First telephone call of the day:

Caller: ‘I am just calling to confirm your advertisement in Crime Prevention Publication . We’ve got you down for a quarter-page advert. You agreed to it when you signed up back in August’, followed by some unconvincing flannel about circulation and readership etc.

Me: ‘I don’t remember any such conversation, and I would never advertise in anything called Crime Prevention Publication. It sounds like you’ve just made it up.’

Caller: ‘But you agreed, back in August; it’s all written down here.’

Me: ‘I don’t think so. What’s your number and I’ll check and call you back?’

They hung up.

Oh, the irony. Crime Prevention Publication scam. This sort of call happens about twice a year. Quite often the publication I have supposedly agreed to sponsor will be called something like Be Nice to Sick Children.

Till total £145.98

20 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Nicky came in today. I drove to Lockerbie and took the train to Edinburgh for a meeting at the National Library of Scotland to discuss the possibility of using their out-of-copyright classical recordings to set up a radio station to which businesses could pay a small subscription and avoid the punitive fees imposed by PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) and the PRS (Performing Right Society), two organisations whose raison d’être appears to be to extract money from anyone who plays recorded music in the workplace. On the train I was sitting next to a group of people, one of whom had a Kindle. He spent an hour lecturing his slackjawed companions about the wonder of the bloody thing at considerable volume while the rest of us attempted in vain to read books, magazines and newspapers. Eventually – and with no sense of irony – he barked. ‘Of course, I can’t possibly read if someone in the room is talking.’ Every head in the carriage simultaneously snapped towards him in a collective scowl.

Today’s Facebook post from Nicky:

Very harassed yesterday – sent lots of our best stock off to a new customer in Germany, shelves are looking empty!

Customer of the day had to be the woman, along with her adult daughter, who handled most of our lovely antiquarian stock & dropped one on the floor, snapping off the leather boards. Then when she asked did we have any Steinbeck books (‘yes, we do’, big smile, customer is always right) sneezed ALL OVER ME.

No, she did not buy anything.

I spent the night in Edinburgh with my sister Lulu and her family.

Till total £170.99

14 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Left Edinburgh at 10 a.m. Nicky was in the shop, and I’d asked her if she would mind packing the books for the Random Book Club. Arrived home just after lunchtime, and to my surprise she had done it and had organised the postman to collect the seven sacks.

As I was sorting through boxes, I found an old guide to Wigtownshire which contained an advert for the shop when it was a grocer’s in the 1950s. Occasionally a visitor to the shop will drop in to tell me that the shop was Pauling’s, the grocer, when they lived in Wigtown, or that they were related to the people who ran it when it was a grocer’s shop.

Till total £90.50

5 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 3

At 11 a.m. a teenage boy shuffled awkwardly to the counter and placed a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye in front of me, with the £2.50 change required to pay for it. Few books have affected me the way that book did when I was around the same age as that boy, and going through the tortuous transition into adulthood. Salinger’s portrayal of Holden Caulfield’s disengagement with the world in which he is forced to live must have resonated with millions of teenage readers over the decades since its first publication in 1951.

Till total £48

9 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky came in and carried on listing the books from the Rhonehouse deal. It is now one month since the 5p bag tax was introduced, and Nicky has calculated that the number of people asking for one has gone from about 50 per cent to under 10 per cent.

Till total £149

10 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

Nicky has taken to hijacking Facebook regularly now. Here is her post for today:

The customers were complaining of the HEAT yesterday when we lit the stove & burned the books we did not like, I mean, did not want, i.e. those without proper ‘speechmarks’ so – no more Roddy Doyle or Irvine Welsh – what a shame!

Would you like to nominate any books for burning today?

Today’s Foodie Friday treat was a packet of out-of-date oatcakes.

Mr Deacon came in to order a book but couldn’t find the scrap of paper he had written it down on.

In a moment of boredom I worked out that we have posted out over a ton of books this year. No wonder I have to sit down before opening the Royal Mail invoice.

Till total £57.30

5 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 1

Nicky was in, so I went for lunch in the Steam Packet in the Isle of Whithorn with some friends. I returned in the middle of the afternoon to discover that she had taken it upon herself to wallpaper the section of wall near the children’s section with illustrations of wild animals she had cut out from an encyclopaedia.

I despair. She is a law unto herself.

Mr Deacon telephoned. He wants a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall . When I reminded him that he had told me that fiction was for women, he replied, ‘Most of it, but not all of it.’

A customer who had driven down from Ayr brought in two boxes of books to sell. Mostly Victorian guidebooks to Europe, but not in very good condition. She had bought them at an auction by accident, thinking she was bidding on a samovar. I gave her £200, which she assured me gave her enough profit to have made the journey worthwhile.

Nicky, on leaving at the end of the working day: ‘I’ve got a great idea, why don’t we turn the shop into a disco?’

Till total £345.99

19 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 4

Yesterday I had the slightly unsettling experience of waking up after a lie-in, going downstairs to the kitchen, making myself a cup of tea and wandering into the sitting room with my dressing gown a-flap to encounter the window cleaner staring into the room from his ladder. I beat a hasty retreat. Neither of us spoke of it this morning when he dropped in to collect his £5.

A customer came to the counter with a book on Scottish history, leather-bound, dated 1817. He pointed at a price marked in pencil on the endpaper of £1.50, which was clearly not our price. I checked on our database and we had it priced at £75, and our copy was the cheapest online. I told him that there was no way he could have it for £1.50, and he stormed out. Nicky later told me that she had seen him writing something in a book in the shop and suspected that he had removed our sticker and written the price in himself. Years ago there was a notorious book dealer who would regularly trawl the bookshops of Wigtown, waiting until he saw a fresh face at the counter – someone who he suspected knew less than he did – and erase pencil prices in rare books and reduce them to steal himself a bargain. As far as I know, he is now dead.