6 customers
SATURDAY, 8 MARCH
In London.
Till total £305.48
28 customers
MONDAY, 10 MARCH
Online orders: 7
Books found: 4
Today was a beautiful sunny day. Callum called to see if I wanted to climb a hill, but I was alone in the shop so couldn’t.
At about noon a young family came into the shop: parents with a boy of about seven and a girl of about nine. The boy went straight to the children’s section and immersed himself there for an hour, until his parents told him that it was time to go for lunch, at which point he reluctantly dragged himself away from the chair near the children’s books and pleaded with his mother to buy him a copy of The House at Pooh Corner. She came to the counter and paid the £2.50 for a paperback copy with a look of exasperation, saying ‘I’ve never come across a child who reads as much – all he does is read. He spends every penny of his pocket money on books.’
Nicky didn’t manage to list a single book over the weekend because, as her note says: ‘The printer wilnae work.’ I checked: she hadn’t switched it on.
Local news today is that Bladnoch distillery has gone into liquidation.
Till total £47
3 customers
TUESDAY, 11 MARCH
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Today was another beautiful day, and quite warm too. Nicky came in wisely wrapped up in scarf, hat and coat. Even on a cold day it is often warmer outside than it is in the shop.
Much of today was spent going through boxes of books I’ve had in storage for a year. They came from a large Victorian house near Castle Douglas. It was snowing heavily when I picked them up a year ago. The van struggled to haul the load up the slippery hill back onto the main road as I was leaving, and I thought I might have to spend the night in the house with the strange man from whom I had bought them, but it managed to get away. As I had no storage space at the time, I put the boxes in storage at Callum’s along with the golf books. Among the books I sorted through today was a rare pamphlet signed by Seamus Heaney. Harrington in London is offering the only other copy online for £225, so I put mine up at £140.
Old ladies’ art class upstairs – nobody died of exposure.
When I was closing up, I decided to open the cat flap again in the hope that the intruder has become bored with bashing his head against it and found someone else’s house to piss in.
Till total £49
6 customers
WEDNESDAY, 12 MARCH
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
Very quiet day.
Just before closing, Mr Deacon appeared, looking flushed and flustered, and asked if I could order a book about James I for his aunt, whose ninetieth birthday is next Friday. As always, he produced a review from The Times and left it with me to order. It should be here next week.
As I was locking up the back of the shop, I could hear the sound of geese honking on the salt-marsh at the bottom of the hill, the bleating of new-born lambs in the fields and the croaking of frogs in the pond in the garden. No people. No traffic. Growing up in rural Scotland, sounds like these are the familiar indicators of seasonal change, and for me the onset of spring is the highlight of the year. Once you’ve lived in a city for a few years, I suppose there’s a detachment from these signals of seasonal shift to which the frogs, the lambs and the geese – spring’s harbingers from the water, the land and the sky – alert you.
Till total £28.49
4 customers
THURSDAY, 13 MARCH
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Nicky was in today as she’s taking tomorrow off (Friday and Saturday are her usual two days). She began the day by complaining about the smell of cat pee again. I told her that it’s a stray, and that Mike in the co-op has borrowed a trap from Cats Protection and is trying to catch it. She still blamed Captain. Mike’s garden backs onto mine and Captain is as frequent a visitor in his kitchen as his cats are in mine. The stray has been spraying in his house too.
Eliot has asked me to help write a business plan for The Open Book idea so that we can work out if it can stand on its own financially. If it can, then it will operate under the umbrella of the Festival Company. The Open Book is a plan that Anna, Finn and Eliot have come up with: they want to take an empty shop in the town that has accommodation above it and give people the opportunity to come and run it for a fortnight so that they know what it is like be a bookseller. Finn is a friend from childhood who lives nearby. He’s an organic dairy farmer, and one of the wittiest people I know. About ten years ago he was co-opted to be the chairman of what was then the Wigtown Festival volunteer group. Within a year he had turned it into the Wigtown Festival Company, a charity (which meant it could access new funds), and transformed it from a few inexperienced but enthusiastic volunteers into a slick, professional organisation with full-time, paid staff. After a few years off, he is now back on the board of trustees. I thought I’d do some research for the business plan, so I googled ‘Run a Bookshop’. Ironically, top of the list is a book for sale on Amazon called The Complete Guide to Starting and Running a Bookshop.
In the early afternoon I received a phone call from a woman at Yell.com regarding my Yellow Pages advert and online listing. She asked me if my business was ‘located in Wigwamshire’, which she referred to as a ‘locality area’, and continued that she would give me ‘an example, for example’. She also described my Yell.com web site as having a ‘completely different look, but very similar’. To what, I have no idea.
Seven people brought boxes of books to the shop to sell today. As is often the way at this time of year, I bought more than I sold.
Till total £120
9 customers
FRIDAY, 14 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
No Nicky today. She is de-cluttering, apparently. One of today’s online orders was for a book about instruments measuring radioactivity, for a customer in Iran. At 11.30 a.m. the telephone rang. It was Nicky: ‘Do you want my fridge? I am getting rid of everything that runs on electricity.’ The moment she opens her mouth a gem of some sort will emerge, fully formed.
Mother appeared at 2 p.m. with four hanging baskets for the front of the shop, all planted up. She does this every year, despite my protestations that I am quite capable of doing it myself.
Till total £42
3 customers
SATURDAY, 15 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Today’s first customer was a short man with a wispy beard who suddenly appeared at the counter, startling me. He grinned and said, ‘You’ve got some stuff here, haven’t you? Some stuff. Some stuff.’ He bought a copy of The Hobbit. I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.
After lunch a customer asked if we had a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. We didn’t, but a few moments after he had left, a woman brought in two boxes of books to sell, one of which contained a copy. It’s much more rewarding when this happens the other way around.
Till total £78.98
13 customers
MONDAY, 17 MARCH
Online orders: 7
Books found: 6
One of today’s orders was for a book called Sexing Day-Old Chicks.
The first customer of the day was an unusually smartly dressed Maltese woman who told me that there are no second-hand bookshops in Malta. I’m not quite sure what she was doing in Wigtown, but she seemed pleasant, even if she didn’t buy anything. Just as she was leaving, the telephone rang. It was the librarian from Samye Ling Buddhist centre in Eskdalemuir, about sixty miles away. They have been clearing old stock and want to sell some of it. I have arranged to visit them next week.