My mother came into the shop when it was fairly busy and started to share her less than flattering opinions about the SNP at considerable volume. She comes from the west of Ireland, and despite having lived in Scotland for nearly fifty years, retains the lilt of the country of her childhood. Or so I am assured by my friends – it is undetectable to my ear. She has a capacity for talking that I am quite convinced is unparalleled in the world, and she abhors a silence the way that nature abhors a vacuum. On several occasions I have witnessed her say the same thing (normally a description of what she had for lunch that afternoon, or where she went that morning) in over a dozen different ways in a single breath. My father, by contrast, is a quiet man. This he attributes to the lack of opportunity to speak afforded by my mother’s incessant babble. He is a tall man, 6 foot 3, and trained as an engineer, but he turned to farming in his late twenties. Between them, they have managed to build several businesses and send my two sisters and me to boarding school.
Unannounced visits from family and friends are not uncommon and are certainly not the exclusive preserve of my mother. Familiar visitors often openly talk about things I would not deem fit for strangers’ ears. It often strikes me that perhaps bookshops primarily play a recreational role for most people, being peaceful, quiet places from which to escape the relentless rigours and digital demands of modern life, so that my friends and family will quite happily turn up unannounced and uninvited to interrupt whatever I happen to be doing with little or no regard for the fact that it is my workplace. If I was working in the co-op or the library, I doubt whether they’d take such a cavalier approach to casual social visits. Nor, I suspect, would they speak quite so freely in the company of complete strangers in any other workplace.
After I had closed the shop I called Mr Deacon to let him know that the biography of James I he ordered has arrived.
Till total £41
4 customers
TUESDAY, 18 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
The morning was cold and damp, so I lit the fire. By 11 a.m. there had been five customers through the door; not one of them bought anything. Then a tall, emaciated man in a hoodie came in and asked if we had any books on pharmacology because ‘they’ve just put me on this new heroin substitute and I want to find out more about it’.
Mr Deacon appeared at lunchtime and paid for the book he’d ordered. His aunt’s birthday is on Saturday, so he should have time to send it to her.
Till total £82.99
9 customers
WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
At 10.30 a.m. I went upstairs to make a cup of tea. When I came back downstairs, I was met with a familiar, earthy smell. No sooner had I sat down and started listing books than a short, very scruffy, bearded Irishman shot out from behind a shelf. His appearance (and smell) disguise a man whose knowledge of books is remarkable. He brings me a load of good material about twice a year, delivered in his van, in which he clearly lives. This time he brought four boxes of books on railways and two boxes of books about Napoleon, for which I gave him £170.
At 2 p.m. the telephone rang. It was a woman at the council whose job it is to find work for people with learning difficulties:
Woman: ‘We have a young man looking for work in a bookshop. He has Asperger’s syndrome. Have you heard of Asperger’s syndrome?’
Me: ‘Yes.’
Woman: ‘Well, you know how some people with Asperger’s are really good at one specific thing, like maths or drawing?’
Me: ‘Yes.’
Woman: ‘Well, he’s not like that.’
So I agreed to take him on for a trial period. He starts on Tuesday.
Before the shop closed I stamped and bagged all the books for the Random Book Club, and (hopefully) charmed Wilma into sending the postman over in his van tomorrow to pick them up.
After years of buying, pricing, listing and selling books, certain publishers become very familiar to you: the significant quantities of books published by Macmillan in the early twentieth century; Blackie and Son with their distinctive Talwin Morris cover illustrations; A. & C. Black, with their famous Scottish travel guides; Fullarton and Cassell, two short-lived publishers who along with Newnes and Gresham embraced the technological revolution that enabled paper to be made from wood pulp in the mid-nineteenth century, and all of whose publications are distinctive for their waxy pages; Ward Lock, with their series of red travel guides to the UK; David & Charles, of Newton Abbot, whose books on regional railways are second to none; Hodder and Stoughton, who published the once desirable King’s England series, now no longer sought after; and Nelson, whose red cloth editions of John Buchan’s works still sell in healthy numbers.
Others stand out less for their design or style, and more for their content. Take Hooper and Wigstead, the publisher of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, whose pages contain the very first version to appear in a book of Burns’s Tam o’Shanter; William Creech, who published Sir John Sinclair’s first Statistical Account of Scotland – and introduced the word ‘statistic’ to the English language; John Wilson, who produced the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect; John Murray, the publisher of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; William Strahan, who brought Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations to the world.
More recent publishers have had a similar impact: Penguin, whose unexpurgated British edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw them end up in court; Shakespeare & Company, who dared to publish Ulysses; small presses such as William Morris’s short-lived Kelmscott Press; and the Golden Cockerel Press, for whom the artist Eric Gill (the typeface designer behind Gill Sans, Perpetua and others) designed a typeface which he named after the press. The list goes on, but these publishers – these individuals – took risks and brought new ideas to the world, each with their own distinctive style, from their subject matter to their design, typography and production values.
Till total £131.33
10 customers
THURSDAY, 20 MARCH
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Bum Bag Dave came in shortly after the shop opened and bought three books from the aviation section. He is a knowledgeable character, scruffy and bushily bearded, and slightly paranoid that a firm of local solicitors has got it in for him, for some reason. His nickname derives from the fact that he is always adorned with at least two bum bags, one of which hangs around his neck, while the other is around his waist. On special occasions he has several more, and nearly always has a suitcase or rucksack too. He lives in nearby Sorbie and travels around all day on the bus, making use of whatever free facilities are available – the library and such. As he was leaving today, he asked me what time the bus to Whithorn leaves. When I told him that I had no idea, he replied, ‘You ought to know that sort of thing. You’re supposed to be providing a public service.’ This is news to me. He also has a digital watch that beeps every few minutes and at least one mobile phone that seems to be constantly emitting various irritating noises.