The postman appeared at 4.30 p.m. and collected the sacks for the Random Book Cub.
Just before I closed up there were two telephone calls, the first of them from a retired vicar in Durham with approximately a thousand books on theology. I have arranged to view them on Friday. The second call was from a woman whose parents lived in Newton Stewart. Her mother, a widow, died during the summer and the house is going on the market next week. She is up from London and has to have the books removed from the house by tomorrow evening.
Till total £166.99
17 customers
WEDNESDAY, 22 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Nicky was in, so I drove to the book deal in the house in Newton Stewart shortly after she arrived. There was some good local history material. Clearing the house was obviously going to be a fairly onerous task; it was full of cheap furniture and had not seen a hoover for a year or two. Normally Nicky works Friday and Saturday, and once the summer students go back to university it is just me in the shop for the rest of the week, but she is very obliging and flexible, and will come in on other days too if I can’t schedule a book deal for Friday or Saturday.
Both Nicky and I keep forgetting to charge customers for carrier bags. We have resolved to rectify this by not even offering them a bag and leaving it up to them to ask.
Nicky took a telephone call from a man in Lochmaben with books to sell. I have scheduled him for Monday evening.
Till total £203.55
14 customers
THURSDAY, 23 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
One of the missing orders this morning is called Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema. Bethan had listed it in the theology section.
I spent much of the day checking the prices of our antiquarian stock to make sure we were the cheapest online. In most cases, when we originally listed the books on Monsoon, we made sure that we undercut the competition, unless the only other copies were ex-library or in poor condition. If we sell our stock online at a fixed price, we make sure that we are the cheapest available. Only the cheapest copy will sell. Often we are undercut shortly afterwards, but unless we go back into the system and check, we have no way of knowing this, and if our copy is not the cheapest it will never sell. Most of our antiquarian stock has now been undercut, not just by other antiquarian copies but by Print on Demand copies. When a book is out of copyright, anyone is permitted to reprint it.
Until relatively recently this involved scanning or retyping the book and having a few hundred (or a few thousand) copies run off. This involved a cost, and also a financial risk, so most antiquarian books that were reprinted were local history books which the reprinters knew they could sell in their locale. In the first few years of this century, though, technology emerged by which anyone with a POD printer could print off single copies of out-of-print books at a relatively low cost. The consequence of this is that a search for a rare book on AbeBooks and many other web sites will throw up numerous cheap copies of books that do not exist until a customer orders them. It has driven the values of what were once rare books right down, as the seller is now competing in a market-place that is flooded with reprints, and we now rely on customers who want the original book for its own sake, rather than just for the information it contains. Couple this with the Google Books project, which plans to digitise and make free copies available of the 130 million or so unique titles that it has estimated exist in the history of publishing, and you have a lethal cocktail for those few of us left in the secondhand book trade.
Till total £852.50
9 customers
FRIDAY, 24 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky arrived with a substance that bore no resemblance to food. ‘Chocolate éclairs. Delicious.’ And so began another Foodie Friday.
At 9.15 a.m. I was about to head off to County Durham to look at the theology library when she remembered to tell me that the minister had telephoned on Wednesday to say that he had already sold them to another dealer.
Diana, Anna’s friend, emailed to say that Eva, her fourteen-year-old daughter, will be arriving in Dumfries on Monday afternoon for a week’s work experience. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to take her on for the week, but I remember her being a very charming girl, so hopefully it will work out well.
A customer asked me if I could help her find Christmas presents for her four daughters, but she couldn’t tell me what they were interested in or what her budget was, and since I have never met her children I had no idea what to suggest, although I was extremely grateful that she had decided to buy their Christmas presents in a second-hand bookshop. I recommended Philip Pullman and C. S. Lewis, both of whose works seem to have a broad appeal.
There has been a noticeable decrease in the numbers of people asking for bags, although English customers often look quite affronted when asked for 5p. I suspect that they are unaware that it is now a legal requirement and think they are being fleeced by greedy Scots.
A retired teacher from the nearby seaside village of Garlieston dropped in a few boxes of books, mainly book club fiction in poor condition, but I found a handful of interesting equestrian books on trap racing and gave him £20 for them.
Finished Kidnapped. It was a relatively early edition in a pictorial binding, so I put it back on the shelf. It is a title that always sells quickly.
Till total £149.39
16 customers
SATURDAY, 25 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Nicky stayed last night and opened the shop.
Captain spent the afternoon sleeping in an empty cardboard box in the Scottish room, to the delight of the customers.
Till total £170.99
12 customers
MONDAY, 27 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Nicky in again, and Kate the postie delivered three more anonymous postcards.
The telephone rang at 9.05 a.m.
Me: ‘Good morning, The Book Shop.’
Caller: ‘Oh, hello. Are you open today?’
The first customer of the day was a man with an extremely ill-advised Rolf Harris beard and high-handed tone: ‘Do you have any Folio Society books? You have heard of the Folio Society, haven’t you?’ This is tantamount to asking a farmer if he knows what a tractor is, so I told him that, yes, I have heard of the Folio Society, and have a stock of about 300 books published by them. He bought two of the most beautifully illustrated of the Folio titles, Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies. As he left, he apologised for his earlier tone, explaining that the last three bookshops he had been in had no idea what the Folio Society was.
After lunch I drove to Dumfries for an appointment with the back specialist at 3.15 p.m., then picked up Eva from the railway station. She is here until Friday. Once I had picked her up we drove to Lochmaben to look at books in a bungalow. The books were mainly slasher crime fiction paperbacks. The man was selling the books as his wife had advanced cancer, and he was moving her into a care home. He had bought a small flat so that he could be close to her, but there wasn’t enough space for the books. I gave him £40 for about sixty books.