Till total £227.45
14 customers
MONDAY, 24 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
It was a depressingly wet day when I awoke, but by 9.30 a.m. the sun was blazing. The Polish builders arrived to remove the leylandii hedge and replace it with a new stone wall. After they had cut down the hedge they decided to set fire to it, blanketing most of the town in thick, acrid smoke. For much of the day I could see people staggering past the door of the shop, coughing and swearing.
Till total £277
16 customers
TUESDAY, 25 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Sandy, the most tattooed man in Scotland, brought in some walking sticks he’d made. We have an arrangement whereby he gets £6 credit in the shop for each one he brings me. I then sell the sticks for £10 each. They sell well – probably one or two a week – and he adds a label with the name of the wood and some local lore about it. His taste in reading is mainly for Scottish folklore and ancient history. He is a pagan and lives near Stranraer, but comes over once every couple of weeks with a friend and makes a day out of his trip to Wigtown, going for lunch or coffee and browsing in the shops. He is incredibly affable, always good-natured and invariably has something interesting to say. Best of all, he loves winding up Nicky.
At noon I made a sandwich, and Anna and I headed off in the van with fifty or so cardboard boxes to the old farmhouse near Stranraer. The grizzled farmer in his damp tweed cap met us again and took us back up to the house where the old couple had lived. It was even more filthy than I remembered. Anna and I started boxing the books and ferrying them to the van. The lonely cat gasped a cracked ‘meow’ every time we passed it, then resumed its wistful stare out across the flooded fields full of cattle with their backs to the driving rain.
As is often the way with clearing books that have been in the same place for a long time, by the time we were finished we were comprehensively covered in dirt and cat hair – a facet of the genteel art of bookselling that people rarely imagine. I paid the farmer and creaked off down the potholed driveway, the van grinding slowly under the weight of the load.
The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall – the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris – evoke a kind of melancholy that is not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character – you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books, in the same way that people who lose a child often can’t bear to remove anything from their bedroom for years.
Till total £124
9 customers
WEDNESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
This morning a customer asked for books by Nigel Tranter, clearly confident that we wouldn’t have any. I directed him to the Scottish room, where we have most of Tranter’s work, including his architectural material, with a couple of exceptions. A few minutes later he scuttled out of the shop, trying not to be noticed. Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are and have no intention of buying anything.
An incredibly haughty woman telephoned demanding the festival bed for the entire festival. The festival bed is a mezzanine bed that we built last year in the shop, partly as a homage to Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, partly as a publicity stunt and partly as an occasionally necessary extra bed. When I told her that it was unlikely that we were going to do it this year, she didn’t seem to want to understand and kept insisting that she needed it for the night of 29 September at the very least. It wasn’t long before the conversation took an ominous turn with the alarming words ‘I have an ulterior motive – I want to speak to you and Anna.’
It transpired that she’s written an autobiography. It is called No, I Am Not Going on the Seesaw. The conversation was littered with references to the people she knows in publishing (‘I am not thinking about self-publishing, you know’), her insistence on finding her own proofreader (‘I have it on good authority that most proofreaders are incompetent’) and pregnant pauses to which she clearly attached weighty significance.
She talked – again at considerable length – about how she felt she should be part of the programme for the 2015 festival. She will never, ever be part of the festival.
Finished Any Human Heart. Absolutely adored it. Started reading Gogol’s Dead Souls. We had a copy in the Black Penguin Classics section.
Till total £66
7 customers
THURSDAY, 27 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Books found: 1
On my sister’s advice, I checked TripAdvisor to see whether anyone had reviewed the shop. There were nine reviews, two of which made references to the quality of the food. We do not serve food. We have never served food. Two more complained that the shop ‘wasn’t as big’ as they had expected it to be.
Inspired, I wrote a ridiculous review praising the owner’s magnificent good looks, convivial charm, captivatingly beautiful scent, the wonderful stock, the electric atmosphere and a litany of other unlikely superlatives. In no time at all it had been removed and TripAdvisor had sent a threatening email warning me not to do it again. I went straight back onto their site and wrote another one, and encouraged the shop’s Facebook followers to do the same.
After lunch I checked eBay to find that the book signed by Sir Walter Scott sold for £250, so I emailed the winning bidder and sent them an invoice. It’s easy to miss things like important signatures or inscriptions in books when you’re buying, but equally so when you’re selling. Once, shortly after I bought the shop, I bought ten boxes of books unseen from another dealer, a man called David McNaughton, who had been in the trade for nearly forty years. He wanted £10 a box and assured me that it was reasonable stock. From previous dealings with him I had no reason to doubt this. What I didn’t expect, though, was to find a book signed by Florence Nightingale, dedicated to one of her nurses. It was a Charles Kingsley title – I forget which. Florence Nightingale was fond of inscribing books and giving them to her friends, and consequently there are quite a few of these about, but it still made £300 on eBay. A nurse in Missouri bought it. I sent David a case of wine and told him what had happened. Sadly, he died a few years ago. He was among the last of a generation of what can now be seen as traditional book dealers. Before the days of Amazon and AbeBooks – web sites to which one may quickly refer to check prices – booksellers would have to acquire and carry about all of that information, and David was a mine of biographical, bibliographical and literary information. Now this knowledge – accumulated over almost a lifetime, once so valued and from which a good living could be earned – is all but useless. Those dealers who could tell you the date, publisher, author and value of a book just by looking at it are few and far between, and their ranks are shrinking daily. I still know one or two of them, and they are among the people I admire most in the trade. Without exception, all of those I encountered and had dealings with – from what now feels like a bygone era of bookselling – were honest and decent.