Till total £264.49
19 customers
THURSDAY, 9 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
All of today’s orders were from Amazon.
The shop was quiet today. The contrast with last week is extraordinary.
One of the few customers was a woman who spent ten minutes wandering around the shop before coming to the counter and asking, ‘So what is The Book Shop? Do you sell the books or what? Do people just come in and take them?’ Temporarily stupefied, I was unable to answer. Thankfully, she broke the silence and ploughed on, ‘I am not from here, I am a tourist. Do people just hand you the books in? What happens in here? Is that what happens in here?’ I began what with hindsight was a pointless attempt to explain the basic principles of retail, which frankly, she ought to have grasped by the age of roughly fifty, but she meandered out of the shop while I was explaining it to her.
Sandy the tattooed pagan appeared at about 3 p.m. and found two books. Have deducted them from his credit.
Till total £222.45
19 customers
FRIDAY, 10 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
The missing book from today’s orders was yet another one that we had failed to delist before sending our old warehouse stock to Ian.
At 11 a.m. a customer came to the counter with some maps of Ireland, demanding to know the year in which each was published. He then started the dreaded ‘Let me tell you why I am looking for old maps and books about this area, it’s because I am doing family history research and my great-grandfather …’ for about five minutes before I could explain that the maps were undated, but probably from around 1910.
I am going to get a mask and paint ‘I DON’T CARE’ on the forehead and put it on when such occasions arise in the future.
Someone in the planning department came to inspect the book spirals. It appears that a complaint has been made about them, so now I have to get planning permission. She was remarkably decent about it all and said that if it were up to her she would just ignore the fact that I hadn’t applied for permission for them, but because there has been a formal complaint and the shop is a listed building, they have no choice but to go through the process.
The Guardian published ‘Weird and wonderful bookshops worldwide’; we are number 3 again. I’m not sure if these things go in cycles, or whether bookshops are suddenly becoming fashionable places. Perhaps it is the hipster movement driving the trend to be seen with vinyl and real books instead of iPods and Kindles.
Till total £133
15 customers
SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky was in today, so I went to the river with my father in the morning. He caught a 12lb salmon; I blanked. We were fishing a pool called Wilson’s, on the top beat of the river – the pool in which I caught my first salmon (under my father’s watchful eye). It was 9lb, caught on 9 September, and I was nine years old. If I believed in luck, I suppose that nine ought to be my lucky number.
I returned to the shop at lunchtime and gave Nicky a break, during which a customer came to the counter and announced, ‘I don’t want to appear rude, but your railway section is mainly pot-boiler coffee-table-type books, and I am looking for something very specific blah blah blah …’ He continued in this vein for a couple of minutes before getting to the point and telling me the title of the book he was looking for, by which time I was incandescent and his wife was cringing and mouthing ‘sorry’ at me from behind him.
Within a minute of being told the title I had located a copy of the book, at which point he decided that he didn’t actually want it after all.
Prefacing a sentence with ‘I don’t want to appear rude, but …’ flags up the same alarm bells as ‘I am not racist, but …’ It’s quite simple: if you don’t want to appear rude, don’t be rude. If you’re not a racist, don’t behave like a racist.
Till total £312.30
22 customers
MONDAY, 13 OCTOBER
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Flo in.
As I came down the stairs with two cups of tea at 11 a.m. I literally bumped into Mr Deacon, covering his shirt with hot tea. He didn’t seem to mind in the slightest and pointed out several other stains he had inflicted on the shirt while he was having his breakfast that morning. He asked if we could order him a copy of Kate Whitaker’s A Royal Passion.
Went to the river after lunch and caught a 7lb salmon.
Till total £352.99
27 customers
TUESDAY, 14 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Two complete strangers came into the shop at the same time and in an extraordinary coincidence both asked at the same time for a copy of Gavin Maxwell’s House of Elrig. Sadly we don’t have a copy or I could have orchestrated a bidding war.
Ronnie the electrician turned up when the shop was full of customers and started loudly describing the various ways in which we could blow up Kindles. He has a disconcertingly comprehensive knowledge of bomb-making. I will probably go for a sugar/sodium chlorate mix, although he seems quite keen to try an oxyacetylene bomb. Customers who arrived half-way through the conversation gave him a wide berth.
Quiet day compared with yesterday.
Till total £72.30
11 customers
WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Flo was in today. She seems to have mastered her pout, and spent most of the day demonstrating it.
When I was at the counter, an old traveller man who had not been in the shop for years arrived with a coffee table that had been made to look like two giant books. He wanted £60 for it. We settled on £35. The last time I saw him (about ten years ago) he came in and asked for a copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies. My father was in the shop at the time and instantly recognised him. Apparently he’d ‘bought’ scrap machinery from Dad about thirty years ago, when he was farming, but had never returned to pay him. He asked me if I had a copy of a book he was looking for, and when I replied, ‘Yes, The Tinkler-Gypsies’, he looked quite taken aback. The Tinkler-Gypsies is a book written by a lawyer from Newton Stewart called Andrew McCormick in 1906. It is a detailed account of the Galloway traveller community at the time and a valuable historical and social record. For a while copies would quickly sell for over £100 and were snapped up, but I see that it is now available as an e-book, which means that values have probably crashed.
Ecotricity, the company behind the proposed wind farm, have appealed to the Scottish government to have the council’s decision to reject it overturned.
Till total £382.32
30 customers
THURSDAY, 16 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
In the inbox today was an email from Stuart Kelly, to which he attached the following rejection letter from a friend of his who had applied for a job in a bookshop:
Dear XXX,
We have too many people here. That they are all idiots is neither here nor there. I like them. They are firm, and peachy bottomed. I pay them £3 an hour. As a man with ambitions to enter the world of publishing, where artistic talent is sucked dry for profit, I imagine this sort of wage won’t appeal.
One of them now is prattling about Bonnie Prince Charlie. Do I care? No, I do not. But I am fond of her. She pulls her weight. She ‘mucks in’, so to speak. Would you muck in? I doubt it. I think you’d run away to Italy and live out your life in indolence and drunkenness.