Anna’s friend Lucy arrived for a visit. She’s staying until Monday.
Till total £34.50
7 customers
WEDNESDAY, 26 MARCH
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Beautiful sunny morning. Continued sorting through the boxes of books from Samye Ling.
Isabel was in today to do the accounts. The happy ‘You’ve got loads of money’ comment after her last visit was long gone, and a measured warning about the state of the shop’s parlous financial affairs was her parting comment this time. I suppose that after she told me that I had loads of money I decided it was time to pay off some overdue bills.
No sign of Cash for Clothes, who were supposed to collect the books we can’t sell and rotated stock.
Carol-Ann arrived at 5 p.m. She stayed the night because she has to work in Stranraer tomorrow morning, and it is much closer for her from here than from Dalbeattie, where she lives. When Carol-Ann was in her teens, she worked in the shop on Saturdays; she is now in her mid-twenties and has become a good friend. She and Anna get on extremely well, and are forever hatching plans for unlikely businesses which mercifully never reach fruition.
Nicky is working tomorrow and decided to sleep over in the festival bed. The house seemed full and noisy with her, Carol-Ann, Anna and Lucy, all of whom talk a great deal.
Till total £95.75
8 customers
THURSDAY, 27 MARCH
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Lucy, Carol-Ann and Nicky demanded a breakfast of bacon rolls, so I spent the first part of the morning chained to the frying pan. When I asked Nicky why Cash for Clothes hadn’t turned up, she told me that she hadn’t got back to them to confirm the collection because ‘you were in a grumpy mood, so I decided not to bother’. She’s now booked them, so hopefully they will be here soon and we can clear some space in the shop. There are roughly forty boxes of books to go, around about half a ton.
Top priority of the day was clearing the books off the table and onto shelves so that we can process more boxes of fresh stock, which seem to be piled everywhere, including in friends’ sheds. After lunch I went to the bank in Newton Stewart to lodge the takings, and came back to discover that Nicky had opened nearly every box (in flagrant defiance of my ‘one box at a time’ rule) and had only cleared about half of the table – the one job that I asked her to do before I left. A loud argument ensued and Lucy looked embarrassed, made an excuse and went upstairs. Carol-Ann, on the other hand, laughed like a hyena and goaded us into further conflict.
Someone posted a link on Facebook to a web site of Hungarian librarians being photographed holding books with photos of faces on the cover concealing their own faces. I spent the evening trying to persuade Lucy and Anna to do this but using the 1980s porn mags I bought about a year ago. It is not going well so far.
Till total £128
15 customers
FRIDAY, 28 MARCH
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
The old woman who complained about the price of the Stalin biography came back. When she found that I had put the price up, she told me that I couldn’t do that. I told her that I could. She was furious, but she bought it, muttering that she would never set foot in the place again.
Nicky arrived at 9.15 a.m., as usual, and after a brief repeat of yesterday’s row, a new argument followed concerning what she ought to be working on in the shop. We agreed to make a list every morning of what needs to be done so that there is no confusion. Later in the day I found she had made a few additions, including ‘Remind Shaun several times to call people back’, ‘Take Shaun seriously’, ‘Do not waste valuable time poncing about in front of the camera for Facebook’, ‘Offer the customer at least three times the value of the books he’s selling’. To my delight she has recently acquired a half-hearted suitor. Every time he sees her van (Blue-bottle) parked near the shop, he drops in to say hello and chat to her. He is invariably intoxicated, regardless of the time of day, and he attempts to conceal the smell with overpowering quantities of Brut 33. Nicky makes little, if any, effort to disguise her dislike for him, but this seems only to fuel his ardour.
After lunch I went to the co-op to buy milk. Mike told me that he had caught the stray tom-cat which has been spraying in his house and my shop. Captain will be relieved. He has been jumpy for weeks, and the place has reeked of cat piss.
Anna, Lucy and I went to Galloway House Gardens in the afternoon and picked wild garlic, then spent the evening making wild garlic pesto, using olive oil, parmesan and walnuts. This is one of Anna’s highlights of the year.
Nicky found a book in the Samye Ling collection called Vamping Made Easy. Disappointingly, it is about piano scales.
Mr Deacon dropped in to order a book shortly before closing, and confirmed that his aunt had received and was delighted with the biography of James I.
Till total £97
10 customers
SATURDAY, 29 MARCH
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Nicky took today off, so I was alone in the shop again. Six orders today, including one on Scottish medieval poetry, which is shipping to Baghdad.
An elderly couple came in after lunch, wielding a Farmfoods bag full of books. This is never a promising start. They had been clearing an aunt’s house and had come across a few old books which, it transpired, were part of an incomplete set of Dickens – in dreadful condition – from the 1920s. They wanted a valuation. As the husband produced the first book, I told him that it was worth nothing. He clearly did not believe me and continued to produce the others, one at a time, asking, ‘How about that one?’ I tried to explain that there was no point in showing me any more if they were all from the same set, but five minutes later he was still proffering them.
I went upstairs in the late afternoon, but by the time I got to the kitchen another voice was summoning me down. Standing in the shop was a tall hipster with a beard and tweed cap, holding a Tesco bag full of books. A Tesco bag is an improvement on a Farmfoods bag in terms of the quality of books it is likely to contain, but only a marginal one, and the books in this particular case were indeed better but still stock of which I already had an abundance, so I rejected them, primarily because he kept calling me ‘Buddy’.
Till total £105
12 customers
MONDAY, 31 MARCH
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Half an hour late opening the shop this morning because I forgot that the clocks had gone forward.
Monsoon was playing up, so I checked the settings. By chance this led me to discover some of Nicky’s ‘Frequently Used’ notes for describing books on our online listings:
‘no ink marks’
‘which looks to be unread’
‘some lovely pictures!’
Normally the notes I would use for describing books would be along the lines of:
‘Previous owner’s name on front free endpaper’
‘Blind stamped front board, five raised bands’
‘Deckled edges to pages, bevelled boards’
But, as Nicky frequently points out, these are terms that are only of use when talking to other people in the trade. They are unhelpful when dealing with people who have no understanding of the jargon of books. Ian, my bookseller friend from Grimsby, often has this conversation with his wife, who believes that the language of book jargon belongs to a bygone age and that the internet has made it all but redundant, with the exception of auction catalogues. When I bought the shop in 2001, before the internet morphed into the monstrous retail machine that it has in part become, many booksellers would send out catalogues of their stock to customers on their mailing lists, and by necessity they would have to provide detailed descriptions of the titles they were selling, but the use of vocabulary such as ‘gilt dentelles’, ‘verso’ or ‘recto’, ‘octavo’, ‘fleuron’ and ‘colophon’ has since become almost irrelevant to the selling of books. To my knowledge there is nobody in the trade who still sends out catalogues, and with the swift and apparently inexorable decline in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, I fear that we may go the same way. Our times, though, are not the first transitional period in the history of publishing and bookselling. As Jen Campbell points out in The Bookshop Book, following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the first ‘mass market’ books becoming available, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his shop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.’