Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Online orders: 7

Books found: 5

Mac TV telephoned to organise the film shoot for Wednesday. I spoke to Ishi and arranged to meet her here at the shop at 2 p.m. on Wednesday to have a conversation about what the reality of running a second-hand bookshop is like.

Telephone call this morning:

Caller: ‘Hello! Hello! I think I have got the wrong number, is that Allison Motors?’

Me: ‘You have got the wrong number, this is The Book Shop.’

Caller: ‘Never mind, you might be able to help. Have you got an alternator for a Vauxhall Nova?’

It was dark outside when I locked up, but the days are getting noticeably longer now.

Till total £32.50

5 customers

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

One of this morning’s orders was for British Trees: A Guide for Everyman . According to Nicky’s locator code, this is filed under Scottish poetry.

After lunch I drove to Newton Stewart for a meeting with the accountant. He surprised me by telling me that – after a few precarious years – this set of accounts is looking considerably healthier. It certainly feels like I am working harder than I did when I bought the business fourteen years ago, but I suppose now more time is spent listing books on the computer, and competition online is fierce, whereas back then, that side of the business was relatively small in comparison. Still, whatever is required to keep the ship afloat will be done. This life is infinitely preferable to working for someone else.

A very irritating man with a greasy moustache bought a set of Victorian leather-bound Waverley novels for £110. When I gave him a £20 discount, he replied, ‘Is that all?’

Putting books out in the Scottish paperbacks section this afternoon, I spotted a copy of Robin Jenkins’s The Cone Gatherers . Started reading it after supper.

Till total £141

5 customers

Online orders: 5

Books found: 4

Nicky came in so that I could head up to Edinburgh to look at a private library in the afternoon.

We failed to locate a book about medieval Gothic art that Nicky had listed as being in the India section.

In the afternoon the film crew arrived and we filmed part of the documentary that Ishi is presenting. The shop was funereally silent all day until the moment the crew started filming, at which point customers suddenly started flooding in, asking questions and tripping over cables. One tall, elderly man in a crumpled black suit made a particular nuisance of himself before settling down in front of the fire. As I passed him to put a book in the poetry section, I noticed that he had removed his false teeth and put them on top of a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography which had been left on the table.

While we were filming, I spotted Nicky grubbing around in a box of books that I had earmarked for the recycling plant in Glasgow. She and I had a discussion about death. Nicky: ‘If I die before Armageddon, my pal George is going to make me a coffin out of an old pallet, put me in the back of my van and dump me in the woods somewhere.’ I told her that I want a Viking ship burial, to which she responded, ‘Ye cannae do that. The only way around it is to have a Romany funeral. You’ll have to build yourself a caravan and set fire to it. Oh, wait, you’ll be dead. You’ll have to get someone else to set fire to it.’

When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot , I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down – as if for confirmation of this – then looked back at me and said, ‘A dead bird can’t fall out of its nest’, and left the shop, fly still agape.

Mr Deacon came in at 4 p.m. to order a book, The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir. His arm is no longer in plaster. Today’s exchange was typically brief and pragmatic until I had a coughing fit as he was on the point of leaving. He said, ‘You have my sympathy, I am ill too.’ Curious to find out what his ailment was, I took the unprecedented step of inquiring, to which he replied, ‘Alzheimer’s. Can’t remember words very well these days.’ Following this rather sad revelation we had the first conversation about his life that we have ever had, other than the announcement that the companions he once brought to the shop were his daughters. He had been a barrister and was finding his inability to find the correct words deeply frustrating.

I left the shop at 4.30 p.m. to go to Edinburgh. As the door swung shut behind me, I turned around to see Nicky sellotaping another of her home-made labels onto the edge of a shelf. It appears that ‘Home Front Novels’ have made an unwelcome return.

Till total £18.50

4 customers

The diary was written in 2014, and today is 1 November 2016: fifteen years to the day since I bought the shop. Since I completed the first draft of the diary, almost two years have elapsed, and a few things have changed.

The distillery has recently re-opened, and an Australian businessman is overhauling it with a view to significantly increasing production.

The Box of Frogs (the shop next door) changed hands a year ago and is now Curly Tale Books, run by Jayne (Flo’s mother).

The Wigtown Ploughman has changed hands and is now Craft Hotel.

Captain has continued to put on weight, and customers rarely fail to comment on his size.

In 2015 Waterstones stopped selling Kindles, following poor sales and a resurgence in print book sales.

The Open Book continues to attract visitors and runs under the umbrella of the Wigtown Festival Company. It has surpassed everyone’s most optimistic expectations in the success that it has proved to be. Residents have come from as far afield as Canada, the Americas (both North and South), France, Spain, Italy, New Zealand and Taiwan. Many of them have returned for holidays in Wigtown and the area, and, with a couple of exceptions, they have all adored it. It is fully booked for the next eighteen months.

Nicky has found another job, closer to her hovel, and now works in the Keystore in Glenluce selling lottery tickets, cigarettes and cheap cider.

Laurie is a chocolatier and lives in Glasgow.

Katie has finished medical school and is working as a doctor in Falkirk hospital.

Flo is charming her way through Edinburgh University.

Eliot continues to do an excellent job of programming the Wigtown Book Festival, which grows year on year.

Jessie from The Picture Shop sadly died a few days after the end of the diary.

I have only seen Mr Deacon once since he told me about his Alzheimer’s. He had undergone a significant decline, and clearly didn’t recognise me.

Anna and I have gone our separate ways, but remain good friends.

The shop is still open.

This figure does not take into account our online sales, the money for which Amazon deposits into the shop’s bank account every fortnight. Online turnover is considerably less than that of the shop, averaging £42 per day. Since 2001, when I bought the shop, there have been tectonic shifts in the book trade, to which we have had no choice but to adapt. Back then online selling was in its relative infancy, and AbeBooks was the only real player for second-hand books; Amazon at that point sold only new books. Because AbeBooks was set up by booksellers, the costs were kept as low as possible. It was a very good means of selling more expensive books – the sort that might have otherwise been hard to sell in the shop – and because there were relatively few of us selling through it back then, we could realise pretty decent prices. Now, of course, Amazon is consuming everything in its path. It has even consumed AbeBooks, taking it over in 2008, and the online market-place is now saturated with books, both real and electronic. Yet we have no real alternative but to use Amazon and AbeBooks through which to sell our stock online, so reluctantly we do. Competition has driven prices to a point at which online bookselling is reduced to either a hobby or a big industry dominated by a few huge players with vast warehouses and heavily discounted postal contracts. The economies of scale make it impossible for the small or medium-sized business to compete. At the heart of it all is Amazon, and while it would be unfair to lay all the woes of the industry at Amazon’s feet, there can be no doubt that it has changed things for everyone. Jeff Bezos did not register the domain name ‘relentless.com’ without reason. The total for the number of customers may also be misleading – it is not representative of footfall, merely of the number of customers who buy books. Normally, the footfall is around five times the figure for the number who buy.