One of today’s orders was for a book titled A History of Orgies.
Another new Random Book Club member signed up today.
At 11 a.m. an extremely large woman brought in six boxes of cookery books, mostly about dieting. I gave her £70 for them.
After lunch I brought in the eight boxes of railway books I picked up on Thursday in Glasgow. As I was stacking them in the front of the shop, a man (who had managed to position himself so that I had to say ‘excuse me’ with every single box I brought in) asked me ‘Are those more boxes of books?’, as if he had unearthed a dark secret. When I told him that they were, he laughed loudly for an uncomfortably long time.
When you deal with large numbers of different people every day, you start to notice behavioural patterns. One of the more curious for me is to see what people laugh at. I have no idea why that customer found it so unimaginably amusing that a bookseller was bringing boxes of books into a bookshop. Quite often it is something that isn’t the slightest bit amusing that triggers laughter, and even more frequently people will laugh at one of their own banal comments or observations. Sometimes it appears to be used as a sort of punctuation mark to denote the end of a sentence. I once bought a psychology library from a house in Cumbria, among which was a book called Laughter, by Robert R. Provine. According to him, only primates have the capacity to laugh, and ‘there are thousands of languages, hundreds of thousands of dialects, but everyone speaks laughter in pretty much the same way’. Nor is laughter particularly confined to humour; speakers tend to laugh 20 per cent more than their audiences. Despite this, and the fact that laughter is clearly social shorthand for amicability, the things at which customers laugh still baffle me.
After work I went down to my parents’ house to fix Mum’s ‘constipated’ iPad. One of their friends was there, and we had a long conversation about pets, during which he confessed that he never gives his dogs food that he would not be prepared to eat himself. On a number of occasions this has resulted in him eating tinned dog food.
Till total £345.87
23 customers
MONDAY, 7 APRIL
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
One order was for the Penguin edition of John Steinbeck’s letters, which we had listed a few weeks ago for £5. It sold online for £24. At the time of listing, ours was price-matched against the cheapest copy online, which must have sold, and ours has been re-priced against the next cheapest, which was £24. This usually works the other way round and books online become cheaper as dealers undercut one another.
Our Amazon seller status has dropped from Good to Fair again, thanks to the unfulfilled orders from Friday and Saturday.
Sold a book called The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex to an American woman.
When I was sorting through the books that a man had brought in in bin-liners on Saturday, I found a woven Victorian bookmark in a book onto which were stitched the words ‘I love little Pussy’ with a picture of a cat beneath it.
The shop was extremely busy today, no doubt because it is school holiday time. At 5 p.m. a woman asked if her husband had left, so I told her that I had no idea who her husband was or what he looked like. She scowled and left.
Email in the inbox at closing from Crail Bookshop in Fife, which has just closed down. They have 12,000 books that they want to sell, and offered me a chance to look at them with a view to buying. I declined. Trade stock has usually been run down and the best books removed before it is sold as a single lot.
Another email from a collector in Edinburgh who has 13,000 books to sell. I replied asking for more information.
Till total £239.37
33 customers
TUESDAY, 8 APRIL
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.
Andrew arrived at 11 a.m. and worked until noon. He managed to finish the Cs in the crime section.
Just as I came downstairs from making a cup of tea, a man came to the counter with a copper bracelet from the table of antiques in the shop and asked, ‘C’est combien?’ Quite why he chose to speak in French I have no idea. He wasn’t even French; he was Scottish.
Eliot arrived at 4 p.m., and promptly removed his shoes. Within five minutes I had tripped on them twice.
Four customers commented on how fat Captain has become.
The shop was bustling all day, but I managed to finish Dead Souls despite this.
Till total £451.41
33 customers
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Unusually, Nicky was at work on time today; she’s occasionally ten minutes early but normally fifteen minutes late. She arrived clutching her hairbrush and toothbrush and ran upstairs to smarten herself up. She looked exactly the same when she came down. When I asked her why she was in such a flap, she replied, ‘Dinnae try to eat cold stir-fry when you’re driving. I went over a bump and most of it ended up going up my sleeves and down my cleavage.’
She dodged off for lunch just as an American family came in. Three generations. The grandfather came to the counter with three books, slammed them down and barked, ‘Here, lad’ at me, then thrust his credit card at the machine and followed with, ‘You people take credit cards, don’t you?’ while his grandchildren charged about the shop making chaos as their father shouted at them. He came to the counter with an eighteenth-century four-volume history of Scotland, priced at £100, and asked where our section on Badenoch was. When I told him that we don’t have a specific section on Badenoch, he ploughed on, telling me that that was where his family was from, as though this was somehow better than being from any other place. The sense of peace when they left was practically palpable but, in their defence, they bought the £100 set. They are redeemed.
Often, even after you’ve told customers that you do not have a copy of the book they’re looking for in stock, they will insist on telling you at great length and in tedious detail why they’re looking for that particular title. A few possible explanations for this have occurred to me, but the one by which I am most convinced is that it is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. They want you to know that this is a subject about which they are informed, and even if they are wrong about whatever they’ve chosen to pontificate on, they drone on – normally at a volume calculated to reach not only the cornered bookseller but everyone else in the vicinity too.
Finn, Anna and I were having a meeting in the kitchen when Eliot burst in, talking loudly on his phone. Rather than apologise for the intrusion, he kicked off his shoes and carried on talking. Eventually we moved into the drawing room, unable to compete with the volume of the one half of Eliot’s conversation that he was sharing with us.
Nicky stayed the night. Eliot had offered to buy supper at the pub, so I grabbed Nicky and we headed over. We had a couple of pints then came back. Nicky went straight to bed in the festival bed, while Eliot and I clattered about upstairs, just a few feet above her head.
Till total £537
24 customers
THURSDAY, 10 APRIL