I spent much of the day filming at the Galloway Activity Centre on Loch Ken. They have built two eco bothies and need videos to promote them. Over the years all the money I have generated from making films for people in the area has been ploughed back into that side of the business in the form of equipment, and we now have what amounts to an impressive amount of kit, including a jib, several very good camcorders, microphones and even a drone. Anna went to film school in Prague, but – apart from an MA in Creative Sound Production – I am completely self-taught and consequently probably incompetent. Although the income generated by Picto (the film business) is relatively small in comparison to that of the shop, I am confident that, if the bookselling business was no longer viable and I had more time, we could build this up into a good business. At the moment, though, it is more of a hobby for which I am paid, and I never actively seek out work: enough comes our way to be manageable. Any more would not be.
In the evening there was a piece on Front Row on Radio 4 about the author James Patterson’s crusade against Amazon. He is a staunch advocate of bookshops and a vocal critic of Amazon. In his interview he announced that he intends to give £250,000 to UK bookshops in the form of grants of up to £5,000 each for initiatives that encourage children to read. It seems like a perfect fit for expanding the Random Book Club to include a children’s section and overhaul the web site, which is now causing me enormous headaches.
Till total £343.67
33 customers
THURSDAY, 26 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Online order for a book called Experiences of a Railway Guard: Thrilling Stories of the Rail.
Sandy the tattooed pagan came to the shop just after lunch and dropped off a dozen sticks. We have sold quite a few since his last visit. They sell particularly well at this time of year. He spent £33 of his credit on books about Celtic mythology.
In the early afternoon a young woman brought in three boxes of books to sell. Most of them were antiquarian calf-bound sets of the usual suspects: Gibbon, Scott, Macaulay, that sort of thing. Not particularly valuable or sought after, but they look nice on a shelf, and occasionally someone will buy them for this reason. They make good wedding presents. She had inherited them from her grandparents and wasn’t interested in keeping them, so I gave her £200 for them. As I was pricing them up, I noticed that volume I of the set of Scott’s Poetical Works (from around 1830) had eight different names written (in different hands) on one of the publisher’s blank pages, each one a life about which I know no more than the name. I wonder whose name will be added to the list next.
Till total £184
15 customers
FRIDAY, 27 JUNE
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Nicky was in today. She turned up and asked me to give her a hand taking something out of her van that she wanted to sell in the shop. It was a beautiful day, and as soon as she opened the side of her van I saw, to my horror, a mobility scooter. She had been in Castle Douglas yesterday with her friend Iris, who, for reasons unknown, is an expert on mobility scooters. They had spotted it in a charity shop window, and Iris had told Nicky it was under-priced, so Nicky raced in and bought it. I told her that there was no way I was going to start selling mobility scooters in the shop and eventually conceded that she could leave it outside the shop with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. She tested it by riding it to the co-op and back. We made a bet in the morning that she would never sell it. By 5 p.m. she had sold it for £150 to Andy, a Wigtown resident, originally from South Africa, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
So I lost the bet and had to take Nicky to The Ploughman (the pub in Wigtown named after a book by John McNeillie, The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life, first published by Putnam’s in 1939 and still in print today) and buy her a pint. We sat out on the pavement in the sun with Callum and a few other friends for an hour or two.
Today was the last day of term for the Scottish schools, so hopefully trade should pick up now as people come to Galloway for their holidays. The peaks and troughs of the business follow the timing of school holidays.
Till total £261.99
20 customers
SATURDAY, 28 JUNE
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky was in again today, and is more or less back to her usual Friday/Saturday routine. I left at 5.30 a.m. to catch the ferry to Belfast, then the train to Dublin to visit Cloda. She is a friend from my time in Bristol. She now runs the family business, a pharmacy in Dublin, and we often exchange customer stories. Hers tend to be more dramatic than mine, and regularly involve heroin addicts, attempted robberies etc. Her friendship is invaluable, as it makes me feel that I am not the only person among my group of friends who is being driven mad by the public. And although Amazon has yet to branch into prescription medicine in the way that it has done with almost everything else, Cloda’s business faces similar problems as an independent competing against chains such as Lloyds and Boots.
I arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and made my way to Cloda’s house in Stoneybatter. We had lunch, and I met her six-month-old baby, Elsa, for the first time, before we drove to the docks to pick up Anna, who had made her way over from London via Holyhead. Cloda had invited us over for an open-air concert in a park in south Dublin, headlined by Pixies and Arcade Fire. It was the first time I’d been to anything like that for years. Her partner, Leo, and her friend Roisin were there too. It was a warm, summer evening and a thoroughly good night. A scouser offered me half an E, after I had bought him a pint, but I politely declined.
Till total £143
15 customers
MONDAY, 30 JUNE
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
I must remember to apply for the James Patterson grant.
Till total £203.45
15 customers
JULY
There are two well-known types of pest by whom every secondhand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
There is certainly still no shortage of people who darken the shop’s door with the intention of trying to sell worthless books. Most days, particularly during spring, will bring a fresh wave of them to the shop. On average, I would say a hundred books a day come through the door this way. Of these – again on average – I would offer money for fewer than 30 per cent. The remainder I would rather they took away, but often they are clearing out someone’s house – a dead aunt, grandmother or parent – and have no desire to have anything more to do with the books, so would rather leave them in the shop. In these instances, when dealing with the recently bereaved, the entreaty is often impossible to refuse. We used to stockpile these on pallets and sell them on eBay, but even that market seems to have dried up. What to do with this dead stock is increasingly becoming a problem for us and many booksellers.