Inside, he explained that the house had belonged to his uncle and aunt. She had died five years previously and the uncle two years ago. It was clear that nothing had been touched since then, or in fact probably in the five years since his aunt had died. A lonely-looking cat lay on a blanket on a radiator by the window and stared out across the flooded fields. The farmer went up every day to empty the litter tray and feed it. Everything was covered in dust and cat hair. There were about two thousand books, crammed into every nook and cranny, including a pile on every step of the stairs. The aunt was the reader. L. M. Montgomery, Star Trek, Agatha Christie, Folio Society and a lot of children’s books, including many complete runs. Most were paperbacks and not in particularly good condition, thanks in part to the cat. I valued the lot at £300, and he asked if I would consider buying them once he had discussed it with his family. I told him that I would, but that a lot of it was rubbish. He replied that if he decided to sell them to me, it would be conditional on the entire lot being taken away.
When I returned to the shop at 3 p.m., I was immediately accosted by a customer who marched up to the counter without the slightest of pleasantries and barked, ‘Gold markings.’ I sighed inside and explained where the jewellery section was.
Till total £307.50
4 customers
SATURDAY, 15 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Yet another miserable day, which did not improve at 9.10 a.m., when the telephone rang: ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. I don’t know how you have the nerve to call yourself a bookseller, sending out this sort of rubbish’, etc. He continued in this vein for several minutes. On further questioning, it transpired that he had ordered a book from a shop with a similar name (not unusual, as Tom Jones so wisely said), and he was not happy with the condition it was in. When it became clear that he’d telephoned the wrong bookshop and that the whole affair was nothing to do with us, he told me that he would be ‘taking the matter further’, then hung up.
A woman wearing what appeared to be a sleeping bag with a hole cut in the top for her head and the bottom for her feet complained about the icy temperature in the shop. The shop is old, cold and rambling. It is a large, granite-fronted building on the broad main street of Wigtown. In the early nineteenth century it was the home of a man called George McHaffie. He was the town’s provost, and he rebuilt the property in the Georgian style, which it retains to this day. The entire ground floor is now devoted to books, and at the last count there were about 100,000 of them. In the past fifteen years we have replaced every shelf and done considerable work, both structural and cosmetic. Customers often refer to it as ‘an Aladdin’s cave’ or ‘a ‘labyrinth’. I removed the internal doors in the shop to encourage customers to explore more, but this, and the fact that it is a huge, old house with inadequate heating, often lead to unflattering comments about the temperature from customers.
Till total £336.01
8 customers
MONDAY, 17 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 9
Books found: 8
More torrential rain. An elderly customer complimented the window display, mistaking the pots, pans and mugs (which are there to catch the drips from the leak) for a cookery-themed display.
I haven’t seen the cat since Saturday. Anna thinks he is being bullied by a rival cat that is coming in during the night and stealing his food. Admittedly, he does seem to be going through a lot of food and there is a smell of cat piss about the place, and Captain never does that in the house.
This morning, as I was going through boxes from our old warehouse, I found a book signed by Sir Walter Scott. It came from a book collection that I’d bought from a castle in Ayrshire. I had boxed the books and forgotten all about them for a few months. It’s always a thrilling moment to know that you’re handling a book that someone whose literary genius has endured for over two hundred years once held in their hands. The best market for this sort of thing is not the shop, and they usually end up on eBay or being sent to Lyon & Turnbull, a saleroom in Edinburgh that usually realises good prices for the lots I consign. I’ll try this on eBay with a reserve of £200, and if it fails to sell, then it can go to L&T.
Our warehouse is a building in the garden that was shelved out for books and had a small office with a loo. It still serves as a warehouse, but we now use it to store boxes of books for which there’s no space in the shop. We built it (in 2006) to expand our online stock and sales. That side of the business had one full-time employee, initially Norrie, then a friend from the nearby village of Bladnoch, whose days were occupied with listing fresh stock and dealing with orders and inquiries. For a while it seemed to make a bit of money, but as more competition crept into the online marketplace, prices came down, and by 2012 it was obvious that it wasn’t even making enough money to cover wages, so with considerable reluctance I had to make the only remaining full-time member of staff redundant and ship the stock to a friend in Grimsby who had a more efficient operation. Before doing that, though, I trawled through it for material I thought might improve the quality of the stock in the shop, boxed this up and moved it over to the shop. This Sir Walter Scott inscription was among those boxes of books. Nowadays everything we buy (with the exception of FBA stock) ends up in the shop, and if a book is worth listing online, either Nicky or I will list it. The only drawback with this system is that customers are inclined to move books, and occasionally we are unable to find them and fulfil orders.
Although Scott was well known when he inscribed this book (to Mary Stewart), it was six years before Waverley was published and his name became a household one. Dedications and presentation copies also throw up the question of the identity of the person to whom the book was inscribed: perhaps Stuart Kelly, a good friend and author of Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, might have an idea.
At 11 a.m. the telephone rang. It was a Welsh woman who calls every few months. She has the most depressed voice I have ever heard and always asks for eighteenth-century theology. When I read her the list of titles we have in stock, she invariably responds, ‘Oh, that’s very, very disappointing.’ She has been calling for several years now, and while initially I would read titles to her and try to see if we had anything in stock that she might want, after years of consistently being on the receiving end of her disappointment, I have given up and just invent titles now.
The farmer from Stranraer called back and offered the book collection on the condition that we take the whole lot. This is a difficult decision as there is a considerable amount of worthless material, the house is in a revolting state and a lot of the books are in very inaccessible places. Not only does that take more time to clear, but my back is creaking and weak. Twisting awkwardly into tiny corners is becoming increasingly problematic, but I told him that I’d take them and agreed to collect them next Tuesday.
Till total £282.90
21 customers
TUESDAY, 18 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 5
Books found: 3
One of today’s online orders was about a nature reserve in Zimbabwe called Wankie.
This morning I received a message from Amazon informing me that our online performance had dropped from Good to Fair and that if it doesn’t improve they’ll suspend my account. One of the principal pleasures of self-employment is that you don’t have to do what the boss tells you. As Amazon marches on with its ‘everything shop’ crusade, it is slowly but certainly becoming the boss of the self-employed in retail. I’ll have to recruit more members to the Random Book Club so that I can break free from the increasingly constraining shackles of Amazon. Performance ratings are based on several factors, including order defect rate, cancellation rate, late dispatch rate, policy violations and contact response time. These are not the easiest of metrics to follow, so I tend to ignore it until they email me to tell me that I am in trouble.