Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

A woman wearing what appeared to be a sleeping bag with a hole cut in the top for her head and the bottom for her feet complained about the icy temperature in the shop. The shop is old, cold and rambling. It is a large, granite-fronted building on the broad main street of Wigtown. In the early nineteenth century it was the home of a man called George McHaffie. He was the town’s provost, and he rebuilt the property in the Georgian style, which it retains to this day. The entire ground floor is now devoted to books, and at the last count there were about 100,000 of them. In the past fifteen years we have replaced every shelf and done considerable work, both structural and cosmetic. Customers often refer to it as ‘an Aladdin’s cave’ or ‘a ‘labyrinth’. I removed the internal doors in the shop to encourage customers to explore more, but this, and the fact that it is a huge, old house with inadequate heating, often lead to unflattering comments about the temperature from customers.

Till total £336.01

8 customers

Online orders: 9

Books found: 8

More torrential rain. An elderly customer complimented the window display, mistaking the pots, pans and mugs (which are there to catch the drips from the leak) for a cookery-themed display.

I haven’t seen the cat since Saturday. Anna thinks he is being bullied by a rival cat that is coming in during the night and stealing his food. Admittedly, he does seem to be going through a lot of food and there is a smell of cat piss about the place, and Captain never does that in the house.

This morning, as I was going through boxes from our old warehouse, I found a book signed by Sir Walter Scott. It came from a book collection that I’d bought from a castle in Ayrshire. I had boxed the books and forgotten all about them for a few months. It’s always a thrilling moment to know that you’re handling a book that someone whose literary genius has endured for over two hundred years once held in their hands. The best market for this sort of thing is not the shop, and they usually end up on eBay or being sent to Lyon & Turnbull, a saleroom in Edinburgh that usually realises good prices for the lots I consign. I’ll try this on eBay with a reserve of £200, and if it fails to sell, then it can go to L&T.

Our warehouse is a building in the garden that was shelved out for books and had a small office with a loo. It still serves as a warehouse, but we now use it to store boxes of books for which there’s no space in the shop. We built it (in 2006) to expand our online stock and sales. That side of the business had one full-time employee, initially Norrie, then a friend from the nearby village of Bladnoch, whose days were occupied with listing fresh stock and dealing with orders and inquiries. For a while it seemed to make a bit of money, but as more competition crept into the online marketplace, prices came down, and by 2012 it was obvious that it wasn’t even making enough money to cover wages, so with considerable reluctance I had to make the only remaining full-time member of staff redundant and ship the stock to a friend in Grimsby who had a more efficient operation. Before doing that, though, I trawled through it for material I thought might improve the quality of the stock in the shop, boxed this up and moved it over to the shop. This Sir Walter Scott inscription was among those boxes of books. Nowadays everything we buy (with the exception of FBA stock) ends up in the shop, and if a book is worth listing online, either Nicky or I will list it. The only drawback with this system is that customers are inclined to move books, and occasionally we are unable to find them and fulfil orders.

Although Scott was well known when he inscribed this book (to Mary Stewart), it was six years before Waverley was published and his name became a household one. Dedications and presentation copies also throw up the question of the identity of the person to whom the book was inscribed: perhaps Stuart Kelly, a good friend and author of Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation , might have an idea.

At 11 a.m. the telephone rang. It was a Welsh woman who calls every few months. She has the most depressed voice I have ever heard and always asks for eighteenth-century theology. When I read her the list of titles we have in stock, she invariably responds, ‘Oh, that’s very, very disappointing.’ She has been calling for several years now, and while initially I would read titles to her and try to see if we had anything in stock that she might want, after years of consistently being on the receiving end of her disappointment, I have given up and just invent titles now.

The farmer from Stranraer called back and offered the book collection on the condition that we take the whole lot. This is a difficult decision as there is a considerable amount of worthless material, the house is in a revolting state and a lot of the books are in very inaccessible places. Not only does that take more time to clear, but my back is creaking and weak. Twisting awkwardly into tiny corners is becoming increasingly problematic, but I told him that I’d take them and agreed to collect them next Tuesday.

Till total £282.90

21 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 3

One of today’s online orders was about a nature reserve in Zimbabwe called Wankie.

This morning I received a message from Amazon informing me that our online performance had dropped from Good to Fair and that if it doesn’t improve they’ll suspend my account. One of the principal pleasures of self-employment is that you don’t have to do what the boss tells you. As Amazon marches on with its ‘everything shop’ crusade, it is slowly but certainly becoming the boss of the self-employed in retail. I’ll have to recruit more members to the Random Book Club so that I can break free from the increasingly constraining shackles of Amazon. Performance ratings are based on several factors, including order defect rate, cancellation rate, late dispatch rate, policy violations and contact response time. These are not the easiest of metrics to follow, so I tend to ignore it until they email me to tell me that I am in trouble.

A family of four came in at 12.30 p.m. Each of them bought a book; each gave a different response to the question ‘Would you like a bag?’

Mother – ‘Oh, go on then.’

Father – ‘No.’

Son 1 – ‘Yes.’

Son 2 – ‘Only if you’ve got one.’

At 1 p.m. Carol Crawford appeared. I like to stock a few new books, probably around 150 titles that we buy from Booksource, a distributor of predominantly Scottish books. Carol is one of their sales reps. She is a charming woman, and we always chat about a variety of things before tackling the book business. Her son, who was just a small boy when she first started to come to the shop, is now at university. Until last year she would come armed with briefcases containing folders of book covers in plastic sheets, and order forms. Now she just has an iPad. She comes about four times a year, and deciding what to buy is a tricky business, particularly since customers no longer see the cover price of a new book as what they should be expected to pay. Amazon and Waterstones put paid to that, so once again I am in the position that – should I decide to – I could probably buy the stock I buy from Booksource cheaper on Amazon than I can from the distributor. I ordered two or three copies of about forty new titles on her list, mainly of local relevance, or written by people I know.

Back in 1899 the most powerful UK publishing houses agreed that they would only supply bookshops on the condition that the books were sold at the cover price and not discounted. Any breach of this, they agreed, would result in all of them ceasing to supply any books to the culprit. This was known as the Net Book Agreement (NBA). The system worked well for everyone until 1991, when chain stores Dillons and Waterstones emerged, dwarfing the small independents. They quickly realised that they could circumvent the NBA under a clause that exempted damaged books. Using a marker pen, they scored a cross onto the edges of the books they wished to discount. Occasionally I will still come across one of these when I am buying. Bitter fighting between the publishers and the big chains ensued, culminating in a ruling by the Office of Fair Trading that declared the NBA illegal in 1997.