Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

By 4.30 p.m. I was considering closing early, but nine people arrived and wandered around picking up books, so I stayed open until 5.30. They spent £60.

I still haven’t submitted the application for the James Patterson grant, so I frantically checked his web site and found that the deadline is 15 January 2015.

Struggling slightly with Satyricon , but largely because of the gaps rather than the prose. Far more entertaining than I imagined.

Till total £323.97

25 customers

Online orders: 1

Books found: 0

Busy day in the shop, with families visiting grandparents and couples escaping from their parents. No large sales, but steady all day.

Till total £401.33

30 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

The shop was busy right through the day. By lunchtime nobody had been rude or asked for a discount. The dream-like tranquillity was finally shattered by Peter Bestel, who came into the shop to tell me that a dog had shat on the doorstep. Peter is a friend whose daughter Zoe is trying to carve out a career as a singer/songwriter. She is extremely talented, and Anna and I made a video for her a few years ago. Peter is the brains behind the Random Book Club web site, and is always there with technical advice whenever I need it. Which is most of the time.

Shortly after I had removed the dog shit with a spade, a family of five came into the shop. The children stamped their muddy boots near the door, but inside the shop rather than outside. They all left without even looking at a book between them.

Anna and I drove down to the Isle of Whithorn to stay with friends for Hogmanay.

Till total £457.50

37 customers

On this part of his essay, I have to concede that I have some sympathy with Orwell. While I still love books, they no longer have the mystique that they once had – with the exception of antiquarian books illustrated with hand-coloured copperplate engravings or woodcuts. Once I had in my possession Lilies , eight hand-coloured bound plates from Thornton’s Temple of Flora. I doubt whether I shall ever see so beautiful a book again. It was in an elderly widow’s house in Ayrshire. I had gone through the books she was selling – a thousand or so – and found very little of value or even of interest until when, just as I was about to leave, I spotted the book leaning against a table leg in the dining room. I asked if she would mind if I had a look at it, as I had never seen a copy before. When I told her what it was worth, she asked me if I could sell it for her (I confessed that at the time buying it was beyond my means), so I took it home, had some minor repairs done to it by a local binder and consigned it to Lyon & Turnbull’s Edinburgh saleroom, where it realised somewhere in the region of £8,000.

Even the octavo set of Audubon’s Birds of America that briefly fell into my possession (one of the holy grails for any bookseller) could not come close to that. Such things will never lose their appeal. And while there is always the thrill of the chase as I approach a house whose library I might buy, and have not yet seen, I read little compared with my life before I bought the shop, unless I am travelling by train or plane. In those journeys I am free from the distractions that punctuate my daily life and can immerse myself completely in a book. When I read James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner , which I started and finished on a train journey to London to see Anna, I clearly remember emerging from Hogg’s extraordinary world, blinking and stunned into Euston station – more disorientated by the place than ever.

During a negotiation over the price of a private library with a seller, the collection assumes the appearance of a glittering prize. The moment that a price is agreed, hands are shaken and the cheque has left my hand, the books instead become a great weight which I have to box up, load into the van, unload and then check, list online, price up and put on the shelves before I will see a penny of my investment returning. The distaste to which Orwell refers happens the moment the books enter your possession – they suddenly become ‘work’ – but that unease is more than matched by the extraordinary pleasure afforded by the rare and exquisite joy of handling a book like Thornton’s Lilies .

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Closed due to hangover.

Online orders: 7

Books found: 4

Nicky turned up wearing her black ski suit.

One of the orders we found today was for a book called The Universal Singular . Nicky tidied it up before she sent it out because the top edge was slightly dusty.

Colwyn Bay Bookshop’s stock failed to meet the reserve on eBay. They have re-listed them at £14,500, with a note saying ‘THIS HAS TO BE THE FINAL REDUCTION’. I am quite sure they will not realise that figure. The mega-listers are paying public libraries a fraction of that, roughly 15p per kilogram. The Colwyn Bay collection is working out at roughly £1.20 per kilogram. None of the big dealers will touch it at that price.

Anna persuaded me to take her to Glasgow to see the film of her favourite book, Into the Woods , which has been turned into a Disney musical. This is my idea of hell: I dislike musicals and I’m no fan of Disney, so the combination of the two will unquestionably result in a film that is the cinematic equivalent of a week in the waterboarding wing of Guantánamo Bay. But we are going next Friday.

The young man with the beard who had been in on 3 November wanting to dispose of 2,000 books from a farmhouse near Newton Stewart came back in with his girlfriend and introduced himself as Ewan and his girlfriend as Sarah. He asked if I could look at the books tomorrow.

Nicky stayed the night and we drank a large scoop of beer between us.

Till total £145

15 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky opened the shop at 10 a.m. She was up and about and clearly not feeling the best, but not bad enough to stop her from hijacking the shop’s Facebook page and posting the following message:

Good People of 2014

1. The Ivy Leaf chippy (Stranraer) – kept a fiver for me when I dropped it; the best & most honest in Scotland.

2. Customer who ordered a book in March 2014, we found it 2 weeks ago, did he still want it? ‘yes please’ & paid MORE than we asked.

3. Customer on hearing the price of a ring was £3.50, yells ‘HOW MUCH?’ – it IS silver, we reassure her – ‘I expected it to be at least £35.00.’

Heartwarming!

Anna and I drove to the farmhouse near Newton Stewart to pick up the 2,000 books. It was a glorious day, and the house and farm buildings were ancient and beautiful. The books were in the spare bedroom of the dairy cottage. While we were chatting to Ewan, it transpired that his American girlfriend was being forced to leave by the immigration authorities in an uncannily similar version of Anna’s story. Anna had been deported for unwittingly entering the country more times than was permitted without a resident’s visa back in 2010. It took a Herculean effort and a significant amount of money before she was allowed back into Scotland – a country that needs all the well-educated, intelligent, hard-working people who want to live here that we can take in. Odd, also, that he is called Ewan, the name I chose for myself in Anna’s book. When we were loading the books into the van, it emerged that the people who live in the dairy cottage are Ewan’s brother Will and his girlfriend Emma. Emma worked in the shop for a summer about five years ago and is now a doctor in Dumfries.