I left Nicky in charge and drove to Glasgow airport with Anna, who’s going to visit her family in America.
Till total £211.86
29 customers
SEPTEMBER
We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
The children’s section of the shop is always a mess. No amount of tidying will keep it neat for more than a day or two, although we maintain the Sisyphean effort of trying to keep it so. As much as I’d like to blame the children who make it a mess, I suppose it’s just what children do. It gives me a glimmer of hope for the future of bookselling, though, to see a child reading, their attention rapt in the book to the total exclusion of everything else. In general, it appears – in my shop at least – that girls are more committed readers than boys. It was certainly something in which I had a limited interest as a child. Neither boys nor girls ever pick up Barrie, though. Of the Scottish writers of that period only Stevenson and Buchan seem to have stood the test of time, still selling well in the shop.
Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books are good sellers too, but to collectors rather than children. I once bought a set of them from another dealer, and took them to a book fair (another part of the trade that, with a few notable exceptions, appears to be exhaling the last rattling gasp of its dying breath). The most lucrative trade at book fairs takes place between dealers as they’re setting up stall, before the public comes in. This was no exception, and – less than a week after I had bought them for £400 – I sold the set of Lang’s Fairy Books for £550 to another bookseller at the Lancaster Book Fair. Since then I have not gone to another fair. The cost of travel, accommodation and the stall and the pitiful prices that people are prepared to pay for books these days have made all but the top-end fairs almost entirely financially unviable.
MONDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Laurie was in the shop today. After she arrived I drove to Newton Stewart to lodge last week’s takings at the bank and pick up my new glasses from the optician’s. Isabel turned up at 3.30 p.m., spotted my new specs and said, ‘Oh, they make you look quite intelligent.’ She could give lessons in damning with faint praise.
Till total £153.54
15 customers
TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Laurie in bright and early. At 2 p.m. a customer with a very neatly trimmed moustache came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve been looking for a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World for years after I lent mine to a friend who never gave it back to me. I see you have a copy, but it’s £23. It seems a lot of money for an old book.’ So, after years of looking for a copy of The Worst Journey in the World, he finally found one, and a scarce edition too, but £23 was too much.
As I was sorting through the boxes of books from Haugh of Urr, I came across a copy of Collins French Phrasebook in a box. You really would have to be on the most dismal holiday to find the following phrases usefuclass="underline"
‘Someone has fallen in the water.’
‘Can you make a splint?’
‘She has been run over.’
‘Help me carry him.’
‘I wish to be X-rayed.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I do not like this.’
‘The chambermaid never comes when I ring.’
‘I was here in 1940.’
‘Eleven hostages were shot here.’
Till total £218.93
20 customers
WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Laurie opened the shop at 9 a.m., but neglected to turn the sign from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. By the time I noticed it, 10.30 a.m., not a single customer had entered the shop.
A Shearings coach stopped outside the shop at 3 p.m. This invariably results in a busload of Yorkshire pensioners invading the shop, complaining about absolutely everything, taking anything that’s free, then leaving ten minutes later, urgently demanding to know where the nearest public toilet is. Today’s onslaught was made slightly more bearable by the coach driver, who was the only one of them to buy anything. We shared a look of mutual pity. Shortly after they all left, a woman wandered through the shop shouting, ‘Liz! Karen!’ at the top of her voice. It turned out that the Shearings coach was waiting for them before it could leave. The post-invasion tranquillity of the shop was briefly shattered by her high-pitched bawling.
The proposed wind farm at Kirkdale has been rejected by the planners. Although this is good news, the company pushing for it is well known for its ability to have local planning decisions overturned by Holyrood.
Laurie left at 3 p.m. Today was her last day. She is being employed by the Festival Company, though, to work upstairs as a venue manager later in the month. During the festival my drawing room is converted into the ‘Writers’ Retreat’, an area exclusive to visiting authors who are giving talks. We bring in a caterer, and writers are fed and plied with wine during their visit to Wigtown. Laurie will be given the job of making sure that everything runs smoothly, which it never does. One year one of our house guests had a bath on the morning of the first day of the festival, and, through no fault of his, the bath drain started leaking the moment he pulled the plug, and a torrent of water crashed through from the bathroom, soaking the electric cooker, which exploded with a bang. I had to telephone Carol-Ann and ask her to pick a new one up from Dumfries and bring it over with her. The surge in power when the cooker blew also destroyed the wireless router, so we had no internet, and later in the day the washing machine stopped working. Of all the essential facilities we need during the festival, these three are the most vital.
Till total £173.49
15 customers
THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Today was Katie’s last day, so I gave her a hug as she was leaving. She hates physical contact, so it was particularly gratifying to see how uncomfortable it made her.
Till total £304.38
25 customers
FRIDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Nicky in. Within minutes of arriving she had thrown her bag on the floor in the middle of the front room of the shop, her coat had been tossed in a corner, and she’d opened several boxes and covered almost every available surface in the shop in unpriced, unsorted books. She found the missing order from yesterday, though, which I had failed to find, and admitted that she had put it on the wrong shelf.
While I was repairing a broken shelf in the crime section, I overheard an elderly customer confusing E. L. James and M. R. James while discussing horror fiction with her friend. She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked when she gets home with the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey she bought.
A short, chubby customer in tartan polyester trousers blocked the doorway to the Scottish room as I was attempting to put new stock out. She stared at me for a while before saying, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ After an awkward silence, to which I admitted that, no, I had no idea who she was, it eventually transpired that she was author of many very perplexing posts on the shop’s Facebook page and clearly a woman with an impressive, if entirely unjustified, belief in her own genius. She told me that we had spoken once on the telephone; she is the author of No, I Am Not Going on the Seesaw, her unsurprisingly as yet unpublished autobiography. To my horror, she spotted one of the signs that Nicky had put up inviting customers to read extracts from their favourite book for us to video and post on Facebook. She disappeared to her car and returned with a book that she insisted I record her reading from. It was an autobiography of one of her ancestors, written just before the First World War. The dreary monotone of her reading of it was punctuated occasionally by fits of wailing and wildly gesticulating enthusiasm at inappropriate points in the text.