Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Fortunately her illness prevented her from raiding the Morrisons skip, so there was no Foodie Friday this week.

Mr Deacon came in and bought a copy of Lucy Inglis’s Georgian London which we had in a window display. His left arm was in plaster, but I didn’t ask why, and he offered no explanation.

A woman in China emailed this morning. She blogs about books and has seen ‘Readers’ Delight’. She asked for permission to share it on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube, so I told her that I would be more than happy if she did. She seems to be the Chinese Jen Campbell, travelling around bookshops and writing about them. I have invited her to come and stay here.

When I gave Nicky the paperwork for the orders that I couldn’t find during the week, she immediately blamed Bethan – who hasn’t worked here since September – for putting the books on the wrong shelves.

Anna and I went to visit Jessie in hospital again. She looks much better and had a stream of visitors. Her latest news is that Chris, her husband, has been admitted to Dumfries Infirmary with a heart attack. The poor man’s mother died a couple of days ago, aged 106.

Nicky decided to go home rather than stay overnight, because she wasn’t feeling well.

Till total £118.95

8 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

The sun was shining when I opened the shop, but by 11 a.m. it was grey. Nicky almost arrived on time. She spent the day complaining about having had the flu during the week and stealing my painkillers and cough medicine.

Till total £447.05

15 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Sandy the tattooed pagan came in at 2 p.m., stayed until 4 p.m. and bought a few books on Scottish folklore. While he was browsing, the depressed Welsh woman telephoned. This time she had found a copy of Ciceronis Opera from 1642 that we were selling online, so I couldn’t pretend that our stock was devoid of anything in her field. She asked if she could pay for it with a credit card over the telephone, and when I asked for her name and address she replied, ‘Dafydd Williams’. So, it was a depressed Welsh man all along.

The Open Book is being run this week by a woman from the Isle of Lewis called Ishi. She is thinking of opening a bookshop there and is here to test the water. Mac TV are going to be filming her during the week as part of a documentary for BBC Alba. She came over for supper. It turns out that she has been running tourists trails in Africa for two years, during which she recently contracted typhoid. She is past the period when it is still contagious, but Anna – ever paranoid about her health – visibly recoiled when Ishi announced this.

Till total £12.99

5 customers

Online orders:

Books found:

Nicky was in, fashionably late as usual.

Monsoon decided to do an upgrade, and now we can’t open it, so I have no idea if we had any orders today or not.

Art class was on this afternoon, so I lit the fire at noon, only to be given a lecture by one of the ladies about how much hotter her wood burning stove is than mine. This week the class is learning portraiture and had a very pretty model. When I was attending the class several years ago, the model for our portraiture lesson was an eighty-year-old man who died while we were painting him.

Nicky took a telephone call from a customer who asked, ‘What side of the street are you on?’ – a question that clearly depends on which direction you are approaching from. He drove to the shop with a car load of books to sell. Nicky rejected them all.

Heavy snow forecast for tomorrow.

Till total £110

5 customers

Online orders: 7

Books found: 6

Monsoon was working again this morning, so today we had two days’ worth of orders to deal with.

Till total £90.50

5 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Nicky was in today, and was her usual chirpy self.

Just before lunch a customer came in. Within moments of her arrival Nicky and I were gasping for air. She must have doused herself thoroughly in a perfume so utterly and horribly choking that I can only assume that it was developed in a chemical weapons laboratory by a particularly sadistic scientist during the Cold War.

Very quiet day in the shop, so even the toxic chemical woman was greeted with feigned enthusiasm. It snowed from about 3 p.m. onwards.

Till total £32

3 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Nicky was back in again. Following her illness, she appears to have forgotten about Foodie Friday, much to my relief.

While I was looking for a book – one of today’s orders – I discovered a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads in the Scottish poetry section, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the history section and Journal of the Waterloo Campaigns in the First World War section. I have given up trying to understand how Nicky’s mind works.

The worst customer today was a balding man with a yellow ponytail who spent an hour breathing heavily in the erotica section, and thumbed his way through nearly everything with illustrations. He left without buying anything. In fact, I wonder whether it was a good thing that he left empty-handed, thus sparing me any sort of social interaction with him.

Till total £107

7 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Nicky was in again: that makes three days in a row. I was ready to be sectioned by closing time.

Managed to recite ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ to myself.

Till total £383

12 customers

The ‘combines’ of which Orwell speaks did indeed come to squeeze the small independent booksellers almost out of existence: Ottakar’s, Waterstones and Dillons tried to do precisely that. Now two of those three have been squeezed out of existence themselves, and the last man standing, Waterstones, faces a perilous future thanks to that combine-of-combines, Amazon. Waterstones has attempted to become a bedfellow with ‘the everything store’ by selling Kindles in its shops, but when you sup with the devil you need a long spoon, and no spoon – not even the longest available in the Amazon ‘Kitchen and Home’ department – is, I suspect, quite long enough to prevent Waterstones from getting a little too close to Amazon for its own good.

There is no doubt, though, that bookshops – mine in any case – can be bitterly cold places in winter. Mine, not because of the risk of the windows misting up, but rather because it is a vast, doorless place with little insulation and draughts that whistle through it like the spirits of dead writers. Winter trade is too sparse to allow for anything more than a couple of hours a day with the heating on.