Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall – the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris – evoke a kind of melancholy that is not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character – you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books, in the same way that people who lose a child often can’t bear to remove anything from their bedroom for years.

Till total £124

9 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

This morning a customer asked for books by Nigel Tranter, clearly confident that we wouldn’t have any. I directed him to the Scottish room, where we have most of Tranter’s work, including his architectural material, with a couple of exceptions. A few minutes later he scuttled out of the shop, trying not to be noticed. Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are and have no intention of buying anything.

An incredibly haughty woman telephoned demanding the festival bed for the entire festival. The festival bed is a mezzanine bed that we built last year in the shop, partly as a homage to Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, partly as a publicity stunt and partly as an occasionally necessary extra bed. When I told her that it was unlikely that we were going to do it this year, she didn’t seem to want to understand and kept insisting that she needed it for the night of 29 September at the very least. It wasn’t long before the conversation took an ominous turn with the alarming words ‘I have an ulterior motive – I want to speak to you and Anna.’

It transpired that she’s written an autobiography. It is called No, I Am Not Going on the Seesaw. The conversation was littered with references to the people she knows in publishing (‘I am not thinking about self-publishing, you know’), her insistence on finding her own proofreader (‘I have it on good authority that most proofreaders are incompetent’) and pregnant pauses to which she clearly attached weighty significance.

She talked – again at considerable length – about how she felt she should be part of the programme for the 2015 festival. She will never, ever be part of the festival.

Finished Any Human Heart . Absolutely adored it. Started reading Gogol’s Dead Souls. We had a copy in the Black Penguin Classics section.

Till total £66

7 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 1

On my sister’s advice, I checked TripAdvisor to see whether anyone had reviewed the shop. There were nine reviews, two of which made references to the quality of the food. We do not serve food. We have never served food. Two more complained that the shop ‘wasn’t as big’ as they had expected it to be.

Inspired, I wrote a ridiculous review praising the owner’s magnificent good looks, convivial charm, captivatingly beautiful scent, the wonderful stock, the electric atmosphere and a litany of other unlikely superlatives. In no time at all it had been removed and TripAdvisor had sent a threatening email warning me not to do it again. I went straight back onto their site and wrote another one, and encouraged the shop’s Facebook followers to do the same.

After lunch I checked eBay to find that the book signed by Sir Walter Scott sold for £250, so I emailed the winning bidder and sent them an invoice. It’s easy to miss things like important signatures or inscriptions in books when you’re buying, but equally so when you’re selling. Once, shortly after I bought the shop, I bought ten boxes of books unseen from another dealer, a man called David McNaughton, who had been in the trade for nearly forty years. He wanted £10 a box and assured me that it was reasonable stock. From previous dealings with him I had no reason to doubt this. What I didn’t expect, though, was to find a book signed by Florence Nightingale, dedicated to one of her nurses. It was a Charles Kingsley title – I forget which. Florence Nightingale was fond of inscribing books and giving them to her friends, and consequently there are quite a few of these about, but it still made £300 on eBay. A nurse in Missouri bought it. I sent David a case of wine and told him what had happened. Sadly, he died a few years ago. He was among the last of a generation of what can now be seen as traditional book dealers. Before the days of Amazon and AbeBooks – web sites to which one may quickly refer to check prices – booksellers would have to acquire and carry about all of that information, and David was a mine of biographical, bibliographical and literary information. Now this knowledge – accumulated over almost a lifetime, once so valued and from which a good living could be earned – is all but useless. Those dealers who could tell you the date, publisher, author and value of a book just by looking at it are few and far between, and their ranks are shrinking daily. I still know one or two of them, and they are among the people I admire most in the trade. Without exception, all of those I encountered and had dealings with – from what now feels like a bygone era of bookselling – were honest and decent.

There was a stray cat in the Scottish room as I was closing up. It hissed and leapt through the cat flap as I chased it out.

Till total £11

3 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

Sara Maitland brought in three boxes of books to sell from her personal library. We discussed one of her best-known books, A Book of Silence , and the possibility of her doing an event at Hogmanay: possibly a silent walk followed by a talk on the importance of silence. Sara lives nearby, up in the hills behind New Luce, and is an occasional visitor to the shop. It’s always a pleasure to see her.

This morning I went to Callum’s to collect thirty boxes I’d been storing in his garage. This largely consists of a collection of 500 books on golf which I have been trying to get rid of for over a year. Callum is a close friend; I’ve known him for about twelve years, and we often go hill-walking, sailing and mountain-biking together. He lives in an old farmhouse near Kirkinner, about four miles from Wigtown, with his three sons, aged between ten and fifteen. He is from Northern Ireland, and is a couple of years older than I am. He has had an extraordinarily interesting range of jobs over his working life, from geological exploration in Venezuela to picking Scots pine cones in the Highlands, to being a financial adviser. Currently, he’s cutting and selling firewood, among other things. I suspect that one of the reasons we get along so well is that neither of us has ever seen ourselves as suited to having any kind of career, and although there are some things on which we disagree, there seem to be far more on which we are in agreement.

The books in his garage were from a collection that I bought from a house in Manchester last year. I didn’t have space on the shelves to put it out, and the warehouse was full, so when Callum offered his garage as a temporary store, I gratefully accepted. Now he needs the space back, so I’ll have to find an alternative solution.

Dumfries and Galloway Life magazine came for a photo shoot in the shop in the afternoon. I’m not sure what it was for, but they needed a lot of books as a backdrop. They took an hour and were gone by 4 p.m.