Till total £270.85
28 customers
MONDAY, 25 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Katie managed to shuffle in to work today. I brought up the subject of the parcel with the missing postage stamp on it. She conceded that it had probably been her fault.
Sandy the tattooed pagan brought in five sticks to replenish the stock.
My back is still agony. I had planned to go to the doctor but forgot that it is a bank holiday, so I telephoned my pharmacist friend Cloda. She recommended co-codamol, after which I went to the chemist only to discover that it was shut too, so I ended up buying paracetamol and ibuprofen from the co-op.
Telephone call from Mr Deacon asking if he could order a copy of Alison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitaine. I asked him if he was quite sure, as we had recently ordered a copy for him. He paused, then replied, ‘Oh yes, I can see it on my desk. Where’s my list? Yes, I meant David Starkey’s Henry. Could you order that?’ I assured him that it would be here by the end of the week.
I left Katie in charge and drove to Glasgow to drop off forty boxes of reject stock at Cash for Clothes in Partick.
My memory is terrible, so I have made another note to apply for the James Patterson grant. It is now on my expanding list of things I will kick myself for not doing.
Till total £367.05
72 customers
TUESDAY, 26 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Laurie was in to work today. Moments after she arrived an enormous woman with a ginger Fu Manchu moustache bought a book about the making of the Lord of the Rings film.
A book dealer whom I hadn’t previously met came to the counter and asked if we had any rare firsts, so I told him that he could have the three Flemings that I had just bought for £200. He declined, but bought our War of the Worlds first edition for £225 and paid by cheque. He is the first person who has used a cheque in the shop this year. We used to bank two or three cheques a week when I first bought the shop, but now it’s mainly credit cards.
I had an appointment at the opticians in Newton Stewart after lunch. Following several tests Peter, the optician, told me that my eyesight was very similar to four years ago, when I was last there for a test. When I explained that I was having trouble reading in the bath, he asked, ‘Can you read in there better during the day?’ to which I replied that, yes – I could. He suggested changing the light bulb. We spent most of the appointment discussing mountain-biking and sailing, as usual. On the way out I ordered two new pairs of glasses.
Carol-Ann came round at 6.30 p.m. and asked if she could stay tonight. I called Callum and invited him for supper. Anna and Carol-Ann drove to the Chinese restaurant in Newton Stewart and picked up a take-away. This is what passes for ‘cooking’ in Anna’s world.
Till total £287.96
56 customers
WEDNESDAY, 27 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Nicky in.
Foodie Friday has apparently moved to Wednesday this week, and this morning I was greeted by a grinning Nicky: ‘Look, eh, I’ve brought you a packet of caramel digestives. They’re all melted into one massive lump though.’ She also brought in a bike to sell. I told her that there was no way anyone would be stupid enough to buy it. Shortly after she had put a ‘For Sale’ sign on it and leant it against the bench in front of the shop Smelly Kelly appeared and asked how much she wanted for it. She told him that he was a bit optimistic buying a bicycle, considering he is now walking on two crutches.
An older woman, probably in her late seventies, came in with a bag of books to sell. They were all erotica, and all photographic books from the 1960s. I checked one or two of them and they were reasonably valuable, so I gave her £50 for them. Just before she left she picked one of the books up and said, ‘See if you can work out which of the models in this book is me.’
Carol-Ann stayed the night again.
Till total £461.39
34 customers
THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 5
Katie was in today.
To my enormous irritation, Nicky’s bike sold. Her Facebook update read:
Sorry people, the bike has sold!
In its place though is a bespoke wooden table with a lift-up
lid! How cool is that! Yours for £20.
An elderly woman came to the counter with a book: ‘I’ll take this book, thank you. It’s for my son, you see. He’s a primary school teacher and he’s teaching the children about dinosaurs. I don’t know anything about them, and neither does he, so I have bought him this book. I’m seeing him next week and I’ll give it to him then. It’s his auntie Florence’s seventieth birthday. Do you know, she doesn’t look a day over sixty …’ And so it continued for a further ten minutes.
AbeBooks emailed to tell me that our account has been suspended because we have dropped below their order fulfilment minimum of 85 per cent for a month. I replied and asked how we could be reinstated.
An old man with a walking stick accosted Nicky as she was rifling through a box of books that was destined for Cash for Clothes – ‘I’m looking for a book, but I don’t know what it’s called. I know what it looks like, though. It’s a very old book.’
Sandy the tattooed pagan turned up with some more sticks. Sold one straight away.
Till total £388.03
39 customers
FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Books found: 1
Nicky in again today. For Foodie Friday today she brought in bhajis and pickle – as always, pillaged from the Morrisons skip.
AbeBooks emailed me with a ridiculously complex explanation of how to reinstate our account, which involves me explaining why our fulfilment levels dropped, and what we are going to do to make sure that they improve. It felt very much like apologising for being caught smoking at school. I blamed Laurie and told the woman at AbeBooks (Emma) that I had sacked her for being lazy, and that this was my strategy for improving order fulfilment. She seemed quite satisfied with that.
In the afternoon I drove to Dumfries to look at the library of a retired Church of Scotland minister. He had recently lost his wife, but seemed surprisingly cheery in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. I took one box of mixed material away and gave him £75. The only reasonable book was a copy of Galloway Gossip, which used to command a price of £40 but now makes less than £20.
Got back to the shop at 3.30 p.m., just in time to overhear a customer saying to her crumbling wreck of a husband, ‘I have just had a wander through the garden. There’s a gate with a sign which says “Private” but I went through anyway. It’s lovely.’
Nicky found a book called Working with Depressed Women, which she has decided to keep for herself. We went to the pub after closing the shop, and she spent the night in the festival bed.
Till total £328.89
27 customers
SATURDAY, 30 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Today we had our first AbeBooks order since June. They have clearly, finally, let us back on as sellers.
While Nicky was taking the mail bags to the post office, a customer found an 1876 edition of Daniel Deronda priced at £6.50 and brought it to the counter asking ‘How much could this be?’ I was sorely tempted to tell her that it ‘could be £7.50’. She didn’t even bother waiting for a reply, and went completely off-piste, saying ‘I found Venice terribly disappointing. It was full of tourists’, the perpetual complaint of the pretentious tourist.