PROVE ME WRONG. COME IN AND WORK FOR FREE FOR MONTHS ON END WHILST RECEIVING ABUSE, SOME OF IT SEXUAL. YOU WILL WEAR A DUNCE’S CAP, AND A LOINCLOTH, AND BE FORCED TO EAT RAW SHRIMP, DAY IN, DAY OUT. DO YOU _LOVE_ THE SECOND HAND BOOK INDUSTRY ENOUGH TO HACK IT? WELL DO YOU? This is what we call an ‘internship’. It looks good on CVs.
I suppose we’ll see.
Yours,
XXX
Another anonymous postcard arrived in the post this morning. This one reads: ‘The Bookshop has a thousand books, all colours, hues and tinges, and every cover is a door that turns on magic hinges.’ I suspect that posting the first one on the shop’s Facebook page last week may well trigger even more of them.
Mr Deacon’s book arrived, so I called to let him know.
Till total £309.49
26 customers
FRIDAY, 17 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 1
Nicky appeared just a moment after I had opened the shop and thrust what at first glance looked like something from a hospital clinical waste bin under my nose. It was fleshy and covered in what appeared to be blood. ‘It’s a jam doughnut from the Morrison’s skip. It got a bit squashed in the back of the van. Try it, they’re delicious.’ It was even more revolting than it looked. ‘It’s Foodie Friday,’ she reminded me.
As we were chatting about what to do for the day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Smelly Kelly, her irrepressible suitor, or had my nostrils assaulted by the lingering stench of Brut 33 for a while. I asked Nicky if she had seen him recently, to which she nonchalantly replied, ‘Did you not hear? He died three weeks ago.’
Three people turned up with boxes of books to sell today, including a very tall, well-spoken man in his seventies who arrived with seventeen large plastic crates full of all sorts of books, including one illustrated and signed by Aubrey Beardsley. I gave him £800 for them.
We were chatting about families, and he told me that his had been extremely wealthy until his great-grandfather lost everything on ‘drink, gambling and women’. His grandfather became the first male heir in generations to be forced to secure a proper job, so he went to Cambridge and became a gynaecologist. Because the family was well connected, he ended up becoming gynaecologist to the royal family: ‘He was Queen Mary’s cunt mechanic.’
Two more anonymous postcards. One read: ‘Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate’, while the other read: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.’ The second seemed vaguely familiar, so I googled it. It is by Seamus Heaney in ‘An Open Letter’, and is his brilliantly petulant response to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
After the festival every year Anna and I have a night away in a hotel of a better standard than we would normally enjoy. This year Anna chose Glenapp Castle, near Ballantrae, so we left the shop at lunchtime and headed over there. I spent much of the afternoon lying on an enormous bed reading Kidnapped.
Nicky will open the shop tomorrow.
Till total £228.44
21 customers
SATURDAY, 18 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop this morning. Anna and I returned from Glenapp at about lunchtime.
A customer came in with four bags of books, mainly rubbish, but they included a book called Once a Customer, Always a Customer, which I suspect he put in there deliberately to annoy me.
At 4 p.m. an unusually smart-looking Mr Deacon appeared to pick up his book. I commented that he was looking quite sharp, to which he simply replied ‘Funeral’ on his way out of the shop.
A couple with a young boy came in and bought books. The boy spotted Nicky’s notice inviting customers to be filmed reading from their favourite book and asked if he could read from his. He was seven and called Oscar. He read very clearly from a Harry Potter book, and afterwards Nicky asked him if he was reading anything now, to which he replied ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Nicky was visibly impressed, and his parents looked justifiably proud. They explained that, although there are elements of it that are not particularly suitable for child to be reading, they didn’t think that he was old enough to understand the full implications of the ‘crime’ for which Tom Robinson was being tried. Apparently Oscar had asked if he could read it.
Till total £245.49
19 customers
MONDAY, 20 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky came in today so that I could drive Anna to Dumfries to catch the train to London for meetings. After that, she will fly to America to work on a film for which one of her friends has raised the funding. On returning to the shop I discovered that the traveller who had sold me the giant book-shaped coffee table had been back in for our copy of The Tinkler-Gypsies. He had asked for a discount, but Nicky refused to budge on the price.
Three more anonymous postcards today, all with book-related facts.
Today in Scotland legislation came in to force that makes it compulsory to charge 5p to customers who wish to have a bag. The penalty for failing to charge for a bag is a £10,000 maximum fine. It might explain why I haven’t seen the rep from Marshall Wilson for quite a while. Marshall Wilson is a Glasgow-based company from whom we used to buy carrier bags. The rep would appear every quarter, although even before this legislation was first discussed I had noticed a steady decline in the number of customers asking for a bag and in the frequency of his visits. In 2001, when I bought the business, I didn’t even ask people if they wanted one – customers expected their books to be put in a carrier bag. Over the years, though, that has changed, and now when I ask customers if they would like a bag there is a more or less even split between those who do and those who do not. It will be interesting to see how this affects the demand for plastic bags. I feel a considerable degree of sympathy for the staff at Marshall Wilson, whose jobs are probably now on the line. I suppose a well-intentioned piece of legislation can have an unintended consequence on a small business whose trade is in such things. If the VAT rate on books rose from zero to 20 per cent, it would probably have a seriously detrimental effect on the trade in the same way that the 5p tax has impacted on the plastic bag industry.
Till total £250
23 customers
TUESDAY, 21 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
The first customer of the day came in with a box of books to sell that included a copy of Biggles Takes it Rough.
Kate, the postie, brought today’s post at 11 a.m. It included two more anonymous postcards. I asked her if she could tell Wilma that the six sacks of random books are ready to pick up, and if she would mind asking the postman who collects the mail at the end of the day to drop in and collect them.
A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.