Before she left, she told me that she plans to come to the festival to ‘get an idea of the atmosphere’ so that she can know what to expect when she comes to visit as an invited speaker following the impending success of her book. She asked me if she could book the festival bed in the shop. I should really have seen that coming but stupidly was caught completely by surprise. I blurted out a feeble excuse that absolved me of responsibility and blamed Eliot, saying that he had decided that we would not be doing it again this year. This, despite the fact that I have taken two bookings for it already.
After work Tracy called round for a cup of tea and began describing the most obnoxious person that she has ever had in the RSPB visitor centre. It was the same woman.
Nicky stayed the night in the festival bed.
Till total £246.60
14 customers
SATURDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky was up early and had tidied the kitchen by the time I came down. We had an order for a book called Incontinence.
Posted a photo on Facebook of the Scotland’s War of Independence mug, which sparked a few orders. Bev produced the mugs, based on a pamphlet from the 1920s that I scanned and emailed to her. I am sorely tempted to give one to my mother as a Christmas present.
A customer brought in eleven boxes of books at 10.30 a.m. – a mix of Italian art, physics and statistics. As I was going through them, an Australian woman stood uncomfortably close by and watched, grinning. After a while, she asked me if the books were being donated. I explained that nobody donates books, and I pay for everything. She then watched as I wrote a cheque for £120 for the books I wanted from the collection and gave it to the man who had brought them in. As she was leaving, the Australian woman told her husband, ‘All his books are donated, you know.’ By the end of the day I had sold six of the art books to a delighted customer who had been looking for two of them for several years.
Sandy the tattooed pagan dropped in with a friend and browsed for a while. He and Nicky had a ferocious argument about metal-detecting, of which they are both enthusiasts. There is something about the appeal of metal-detecting to which book collectors could probably relate. Both are scouring their fields for buried treasure, and I can see a keenness in Sandy’s eye when he is in the shop that is, I imagine, the same look he has when he is out searching for Viking hoards.
After lunch I had a meeting with Anne Barclay from the Wigtown Book Festival Company, who has asked me to produce a video for a funding application for Wigtown, The Festival (WTF) – the young adult strand of the book festival. I have arranged to video three of the organisers next Saturday. Anne is the Operational Director of the festival (Eliot is the Artistic Director), and she takes care of all the logistics, bookings etc. She is an exceptionally hard worker. The light in her office is often still on when I go to bed (I can see it from my bedroom window as I draw the curtains), and in the run-up to the festival it is invariably still bright at 1 a.m.
Till total £496.96
36 customers
MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Nicky was in today. The first business of the morning was an argument about her refusal to co-operate with my request for her to sort through boxes one at a time, and to not leave piles of books randomly distributed around the shop. By the close of the shop there were nine open boxes, and piles of books left in seven locations around the shop. When I pointed this out to her, she blamed customers.
At 11 a.m. I drove to Murray’s Monument with the drone to film a trailer for Stuart McLean for The Dark Outside, an event he set up last year, and for which he invited people to submit previously unheard pieces of music that they had written and recorded. Using an FM transmitter based at Murray’s Monument (a few miles away), he broadcast twenty-four hours of new music to anyone within a four-mile radius. He then destroyed the hard drive on which they were stored, meaning that – essentially – each piece only really existed for that one broadcast.
Anne Brown, former chair of Wigtown Festival Company, has requested some audio pieces for Wigtown Radio, a station that will be broadcasting during the book festival, so this afternoon I went round the square and recorded short interviews with people who work in shops and businesses. Wigtown Radio started last year and runs throughout the festival. It is based in the Martyrs’ Cell in the County Buildings, a tiny vaulted room, and is nearly all live, with a presenter, a producer and a seat-of-the-pants line-up of guests whom the producer has to run out and find during broadcasts while the presenter holds the show together.
Finished As I Lay Dying this evening. A customer saw me reading it this afternoon and suggested that, if I liked it, I might also like Nick Cave’s book And the Ass Saw the Angel. I found a copy in the paperback fiction section and have started on it.
Till total £242.30
18 customers
TUESDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 1
No Nicky today, so I was on my own in the shop on a warm, sunny day. Failed to locate two of the three orders. Nicky’s locator codes have been extremely inconsistent lately.
In this morning’s emails:
Subject: I have no money, I love books, please give me a job
Message Body:
To the Book Shop,
I am writing to inquire into job vacancies as I am a writer and like most writers, I am out of pocket. Normally I would resort to waitress work but I am crossing my fingers for a job that involves being in close proximity to a lot of books.
I live in a campervan and am parked up in the area as my husband is currently working with local potter Andy P (he told me to mention him, so I cannot be judged for name-dropping …). I have plenty of experience working with other people and good customer service skills but what I believe qualifies me for a job at your book shop is a deep love and reverence of books in all shapes and sizes. I have always loved books and I always will. If it was legal then I probably would have married one.
I have a hard-working and friendly nature and I can provide references if needed.
I know this is a hopelessly unprofessional plea for a job in the Book Shop but I assure you that I can be professional when needed/forced.
Kindest Regards,
Bethan
I replied telling her that her timing was perfect as the run-up to the festival is frantic, and we need as many pairs of hands as we can muster, but that there will only be work until a few days after the festival finishes.
Carol Crawford, the Booksource rep, called in at around 12.30 p.m. She always times a visit before the festival to ensure that I am well stocked up from her iPad full of new books. I ordered about fifty titles, including three copies of Scotland’s Lost Gardens, one copy of which I intend to keep for myself. Again I feel consumed with the questionable rationale of buying from a distributor when Amazon is supplying the same titles cheaper than I can buy them from the publisher. I suspect that things can’t continue like this for much longer. Increasingly customers are using the shop merely as a browsing facility, then buying online. This is particularly the case with new books, which will almost certainly be for sale for less than their cover price on Amazon, but not so much so with second-hand books, where there is a good chance that they will be more expensive online.