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Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

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Шон Байтелл The Diary of a Bookseller

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Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ... In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.

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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.

One of the benefits of the NBA was that the financial stability of the market it created allowed publishers to publish books that perhaps had more cultural but probably less financial value. Without it, publishers are no longer in a position to take such risks, and consequently, although the number of books printed in the UK each year has increased, the number of titles has diminished: more copies of fewer books. The book market is now controlled not by publishers but by the buyers for Waterstones and Tesco and other ‘combines’, as Orwell would have called them.

Smell of cat piss is getting stronger.


Till total £111.50

12 customers

WEDNESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 8

Books found: 5


Finally, a day without rain. Most of the day was spent packing the books for the Random Book Club and dealing with the Royal Mail’s neolithic mailing system. As the post office in Wigtown is closed on Wednesday afternoon I’ll have to go and see Wilma tomorrow morning and ask her if she can send the postman over in the afternoon to pick up the six sacks of parcels.

This morning I listed the book signed by Sir Walter Scott on eBay. There’s little point in listing it on Amazon or AbeBooks. Although AbeBooks has a ‘Signed Books’ section, this is not a copy of one of Scott’s own titles, so it would never be found on a search.

Four elderly ladies came in at 10.30 a.m. I was working at the computer with my back to them but could hear them speculating about where the craft books might be. After some discussion, one of them spotted me in the corner and said to the others, ‘Why don’t we just ask the lady?’

Norrie thinks he knows where the water is getting in and flooding the window display, and has offered to fix it.

I have reached the part in Any Human Heart where Logan’s son decides to name his band Dead Souls and Logan responds with laughter, telling him that Nikolai Gogol wrote a book of the same name. I had no idea, and felt as stupid as Logan’s son. It will be the next book I read.


Till total £24

4 customers

THURSDAY, 20 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6


Nicky strolled in at 9.15 a.m. (fifteen minutes late), looked at the clock and said, ‘Oh, is that the time?’ before throwing her bag, hat and coat on the floor in the middle of the shop and going upstairs to use the loo and make herself a cup of tea.


Till total £88

7 customers

FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5


Today’s online orders include one of the most boring titles I have seen for a while: British Transport Film Library Catalogue since 1966. It includes such riveting films as ‘AC electric locomotive drivers’ procedures’, ‘Service for Southend’ and ‘Snowdrift at Bleath Gill’. Despite the popular perception that books about trains are extremely dull (the reputation of trainspotters as banana-sandwich-eating, anorak-wearing bores is probably in part responsible for this), they are among the best-selling books in the shop. Invariably it is men who buy them, and more often than not they sport beards. They are generally among the most good-natured of the shop’s customers, possibly because they’re delighted when they see the size of the railway section, which normally comprises about two thousand books.

A customer wearing yellow Crocs asked where the parking meters were in Wigtown. When I explained that there were none and that there are no parking restrictions, she looked completely flabbergasted and commented, ‘My God, this is wonderful. It’s like this place is trapped in a time warp of fifty years ago.’

I locked the cat flap last night when Captain came in. No smell of cat piss this morning. Anna may well be correct about the unwelcome visiting cat.


Till total £24.50

1 customer

SATURDAY, 22 FEBRUARY

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