Шон Байтелл: The Diary of a Bookseller

Till total £51

3 customers

Really bookish people are a rarity, although there are vast numbers of those who consider themselves to be such. The latter are particularly easy to identify – often they will introduce themselves when they enter the shop as ‘book people’ and insist on telling you that ‘we love books’. They’ll wear T-shirts or carry bags with slogans explaining exactly how much they think they adore books, but the surest means of identifying them is that they never, ever buy books.

These days it is so rare that I find the time to read that, when I do, it feels like the purest form of indulgence – more so than any other sensory experience. When an important relationship in my thirties came to an end, the only thing I could do was read, and I amassed a pile of books into which I sank and escaped from the world around me and inside me. The landscapes of Jonathan Meades, William Boyd, José Saramago, John Buchan, Alastair Reid, John Kennedy Toole and others protected me from my own thoughts, which were pushed into the background, where they could silently process without bothering me. I created a physical wall on my desk, made from the books, and as I read them the wall slowly came down until it was gone.

In a more real sense, books are the commodity in which I trade, and the enormous numbers of them out there in the world excite a different part of my mind. When I go to a house to buy books, there is an anticipation unlike anything else. It is like casting a net and never knowing what you will find when you gather it in. I think that book dealers and antique dealers probably have the same sense of excitement when following up a call. As Gogol put it in Dead Souls : ‘Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood, which have flashed irretrievably by, it was a joy for me to drive for the very first time to a place unknown.’

Online orders: 5

Books found: 5

Beautiful sunny day.

Our Amazon Seller Rating has dropped to Poor.

Kate, the postie, delivered the mail this morning at 10 a.m. as always. Among the usual bills and pleas from charities was a letter from Royal Mail informing me that – as part of an efficiency drive – they are increasing their rates. Apparently we’re all going to be saving money because their price increase is less than inflation. I did a few calculations and worked out that my average parcel will go from £1.69 to £1.87. This is a rise of 10 per cent. Last time I checked, inflation was about 2 per cent. Will Amazon increase the amount of postage they charge customers in line with the Royal Mail increase? Almost certainly not. At the moment, the £2.80 postal charge for a book bears no resemblance to the actual cost of posting individual books, so on some heavier books we lose money on postage, which is irritating, and on smaller books we make money on the postage, which irritates the customer. The only winner is Amazon, which takes 49p of the postage charged to the customer, leaving us with £2.31 postage per book.

At lunchtime a customer asked if we ever lose books to thieves. It’s not something I’ve ever really considered much, despite the labyrinthine layout of the shop affording potential thieves with a wealth of opportunity. Occasionally in the past I have been unable to find books and assumed that perhaps theft had been their fate, but they’ve nearly all turned up eventually in different places. There seems to be something somehow less morally culpable about stealing a book than stealing, say, a watch. Perhaps it is that books are generally perceived as being edifying, and so acquiring the knowledge contained within them is of a greater social and personal value than the impact of the crime. Or, at least if it doesn’t outweigh the crime, then it certainly mitigates it. Irvine Welsh explored this idea in Trainspotting , when Renton and Spud are caught shoplifting from Waterstones. In court Spud admits that he stole the books to sell on, while Renton claims that he stole the copy of Kierkegaard with which he was found because he wanted to read it. When the sceptical magistrate challenges him on his knowledge of the existentialist philosopher, Renton replies:

I am interested in his concepts of subjectivity and truth, and particularly his ideas concerning choice; the notion that the genuine choice is made out of doubt and uncertainty, and without recourse to the experience of others. It could be argued, with some justification, that it’s primarily a bourgeois, existential philosophy and would therefore seek to undermine collective social wisdom. However, it’s also a liberating philosophy, because when such societal wisdom is negated, the basis for social control over the individual becomes weakened and … but I am rabbiting a bit here. Ah cut myself short. They hate a smart cunt. It’s easy to talk yourself into a bigger fine, or fuck sake, a higher sentence. Think deference, Renton, think deference.

The magistrate acquits Renton, but convicts Spud.

In any case, I deeply dislike security cameras and would rather lose the occasional book than have that sort of intrusive monitoring in the shop. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four .

The smell of cat piss is back.

Till total £236

14 customers

Online orders: 9

Books found: 8

Another beautiful day, marred at an early stage by a customer wearing shorts and knee-length woollen socks who knocked over a pile of books and left them lying on the floor. Shortly afterwards, a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he’d borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.

A book we had sold on Amazon called Orient-Express: A Personal Journey , and which we had sent out three weeks ago, was returned today with a note from the customer that reads: ‘Unfortunately not as expected. Require a more pictorial version. Please exchange or refund.’ I suspect that the customer was treating us like an online library and had read the book.

Eliot arrived at 5 p.m. for a visit of as yet unknown duration. I’m fairly sure he has a Festival board meeting some time during the week, but he hasn’t told me yet.

Till total £90

4 customers

Online orders: 6

Books found: 6

The shop has a regular visitor who goes by the name of William, or Agnes, depending on whichever takes his or her fancy when he or she wakes up. As usual, he/she turned up with a bag of books to sell. William or Agnes is an octogenarian transgender man/woman from Irvine who drives a Reliant Robin. I’m not sure from which gender into which he/she has transitioned, hence the he/she thing here. He/she had massive hooped ear-rings on and was quite excited about the books he/she had brought in, which were, as always, rubbish. Gave him/her £4 for them. He/she spent some time complaining about the complexities of the benefits system, ending his/her rant with ‘I am a very busy man-stroke-woman.’

Since being awarded the Book Town status, Wigtown has attracted increasing numbers of people who come here to sell books as well as to buy them. The concept of a Book Town originated with Richard Booth in the 1970s. He convinced booksellers to move to the Welsh Marches town of Hay-on-Wye, testing the theory that a town full of bookshops would encourage people to visit, and the economy could be re-invigorated. It worked, and the concept eventually arrived in Scotland. Wigtown’s Book Town project was launched in 1998. Although it was initially met with suspicion by many locals, it has changed the place for the better, and the town, in line with its motto, is flourishing once again. When I moved back here from Bristol in 2001, I recall reading a letter in the Galloway Gazette in which the correspondent – complaining that she could no longer buy a pair of socks in Wigtown – blamed the bookshops for this travesty. That resentment is all but gone now, and it would take a brave person to argue that the Book Town project hasn’t improved the lot of the town immeasurably. It’s not even possible to buy socks in the nearby market town of Newton Stewart these days. That woman must be incandescent by now.