After the fireworks we dutifully trooped to the festival opening night party in the marquee. Zoe read one of Alastair Reid’s poems after Eliot had welcomed everyone, then Lauren McQuistin performed a setting of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’.
Till total £346.75
30 customers
SATURDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
Nicky was in, but Bethan took the weekend off to chop logs for the winter.
I opened the shop at 9 a.m. to find an author waiting outside. Before I had even put the lights on, he was in the door and demanding food, so Nicky told him that the Writers’ Retreat isn’t open until 10 a.m. Maria hadn’t even arrived with the food.
I found two of today’s orders and took the mail bags to the post office. William’s choler rises to an extraordinary level during the festival, and he complains bitterly that – despite the thousands of people who come to the town because of it – his newspaper sales drop. This he attributes to the fact that it is difficult to find somewhere to park, so that locals go elsewhere to buy their newspapers.
Nicky decided that today – traditionally the busiest day of the festival – would be a good day to paint the shop windows and spent most of the morning doing that while I dealt with customers and the chaos of the first day of the Writers’ Retreat. This normally involves me searching for extension cables for the soup kettle, fuses to repair it when it has blown immediately after it has been plugged in, unblocking the sink, filling log baskets and lighting fires.
As well as all of that, Anna asked me if I could film her theatre performances in various bookshops throughout the town. They appeared to meet with an equal measure of confusion and excitement from customers wherever they were performed. One bookseller found the whole thing so perplexing that he telephoned me and said that that they were not welcome back in his shop.
Lou and Scott, my sister and brother-in-law, and their children arrived in the morning. They are loyal supporters of the book festival and always come down for Wigtown’s Got Talent, an event that happens on the first Saturday night of the festival. I fed them in the Writers’ Retreat at lunchtime, during which we heard a fairly harrowing story about necrophilia from a visiting writer. Thankfully, the children were playing with Captain in the snug at the time.
In the afternoon I produced Wigtown Radio for an hour between 3 and 4 p.m.
After the shop closed I went with Anna, Carol-Ann, Astrid and Stuart to Anupa’s opening night. Nicky, Stuart and I then went on to Lauren McQuistin’s Art Song event, then finally to Wigtown’s Got Talent. Stuart seemed particularly impressed by Lauren’s event. Drinks back here afterwards, Astrid slept in the festival bed, which the Italians had conveniently left free.
Till total £989.30
95 customers
SUNDAY 28 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
Nicky in at 9 a.m. Maria arrived hot on her heels, and told me that the fridge wasn’t working, so I stripped the plug and replaced the fuse, then drove to the dump in Newton Stewart with all the empty bottles and bin bags of paper plates from yesterday.
Lee Randall, a journalist who chairs events during the festival, asked me if I could find some books in the shop with unusual titles for an event she is chairing – Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club. I managed to find her a few, including a huge medical book called The Rectum. She looked through it briefly before putting it on the counter and announcing, ‘Very interesting. I have got almost every condition in that book.’
Anna and the actors performed scenes from The Big Sleep and Notting Hill in the shop, once more to the confusion and joy of all who witnessed it. I overheard a young woman whispering, ‘It’s immersive theatre’ to her bewildered mother.
I spotted Mr Deacon chatting to Menzies Campbell outside an event as I was walking from the shop to the festival office to see Eliot about an author who needed a projector for his talk. I have been to a few talks that Mr Deacon has also attended. If he ever asks a question – and he usually does – it is always met by the speaker to whom it is directed with the response ‘That is a very interesting question.’
Nicky found a book by Ian Hay in which the main character is called Nicky. Rather than work, she spent most of the day reading it and chuckling. Apparently there is another character in it called Stiffy, who she has decided is me, and she is editing it to suit her own narrative.
The Writers’ Retreat was busy all day: Kate Adie, Menzies Campbell, Clare Short, Kirsty Wark and Jonathan Miller, among others. For a brief moment they were all chatting in the shop. It was like a literary salon.
It was, unsurprisingly, a late night here, with Eliot bringing a crowd of writers back. At one point Stuart Kelly had poured himself a glass of wine which Eliot snatched from his hand and began to drink, leaving Stuart looking perplexed. Later, to compound the offence, Stuart was tidying up the Retreat (at about 2 a.m.) when he discovered a pair of shoes under a table, so he moved them and put them in the hall. When Eliot discovered that they were his, he asked Stuart to go and get them for him. At this point Stuart was carrying a large pile of newspapers, which he dropped on Eliot’s feet, saying, ‘Extra, extra, read all about it. Festival director unable to fetch his own shoes.’
Till total £447.98
44 customers
MONDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky, Bethan and Flo were all in today. Flo is a student who worked in the shop last summer, and is admirably disrespectful to customers, but considerably more so to me. It would have been handier to have them all in over the weekend, and I struggled to find things for them all to do.
The Writers’ Retreat was fairly quiet, except when Clare Balding was in. I spent most of the day filling the log basket and taking bin bags full of lobster carcasses and paper plates and bottles out of the kitchen and down to the bins.
Nicky brought me in some homeopathic stress relief pills and made me take two, washed down with a pint of her vile home brew.
Till total £467.12
51 customers
TUESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Bethan and Flo in, though Bethan missed the bus and didn’t appear until 10 a.m. Flo failed to find one of the orders this morning, Tokyo Lucky Hole, in the erotica section, and another in the poetry section. I found both in about a minute and asked her to package them. When I returned about ten minutes later, she was engrossed in the fairly graphically erotic Tokyo Lucky Hole.
In the evening Allison, Anna, Lee Randall and I formed a team for Stuart Kelly’s Literary Pub Quiz. We came third, with 25 out of 35. Anupa came back to the house afterwards for a few drinks.
Till total £291.49
27 customers
OCTOBER
First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.
George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’
First edition snobs are, sadly, a dying breed, although many people who bring books into the shop in the hope of selling them will point to the verso of the title page, where the edition is displayed, and expectantly await an offer of untold wealth. Now, I rarely check the edition unless it is a pre-1960 Ian Fleming, or a well-known author’s first title or something similar. In non-fiction – with a few exceptions – it barely makes any difference what edition a book is, yet people still cling to the notion that first editions are somehow imbued with a magical and financial value. Textbooks are something we don’t even bother with in the shop these days. Every year they appear to be very slightly revised and republished. Students (oriental in Orwell’s case, of every kind in mine) are expected to be armed with the latest edition, rendering all previous editions essentially worthless. Commonest of all these days are not ‘vague-minded women’ but men trying to track down a particular title. Their disappointment at being told that we don’t happen to have a copy in stock is matched only by their sense of smug satisfaction on hearing that information. Should the quest for their holy grail ever be completed, many of them would have no further purpose in life. By far the favourite is the search for an odd volume to make up a complete set of something. It has to be the same edition, same binding, same colour. Most booksellers don’t stock odd volumes unless it is a particularly interesting title, or a volume with fine illustrations, so the benighted crusader searching for his missing third volume of Gordon’s The Works of Tacitus (fourth edition, Rivington, London, 1770, tree-calf, five raised bands, purple title panel) can be confident that his quest will continue until he can no longer remember what he was looking for.