I soon gather that Joachim is acting on behalf of Simon Finch, a London book dealer based in Mayfair. Having recently paid £2.8 million for a 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, he might well be drumming up funds. These books in Majorca appear overvalued and Joachim agrees to some stringent price-cutting.
On 18 Dececember 2006, at 08:33, Joachim Reuter writes:
Hi Bill,
Sorry to insist so much after having taken a while to get back to you, but please let me know whether you are still interested in the books. As we are closing down before the end of the year, I need to know where to ship which books. If you are interested, we need to come to an agreement this week. As I mentioned in my last email the final price is negotiable beyond the 40 % discount. So, please let me know your thoughts by tomorrow morning. If you want to reach me on my mobile today I am available all day.
Thanks
Best
Joachim
I’ll have to pass. Sorry but I can’t allow myself to be rushed into such a deal. I would be seriously interested if we are talking more along the lines of an 80 % discount. (I consider the books to be very much overpriced) Otherwise I can’t see any real margin in it for me.
There is no further contact.
The Road to Bangor Pier, April 2004
It’s on the front page of the Chronicle, with Dan extolling its virtues along with those of the local land and seascape. A bookshop on Bangor Pier; the smallest in the world. And Dan’s big claims don’t end there. ‘The most beautiful place to have a bookshop’, he adds. It is.
A Victorian octagonal kiosk with an onion domed roof stands at the pier’s entrance. Plywood shelves are diligently fitted. We fill them with a range of second-hand and new guidebooks and maps, those being supplied by Dan. It’s a joint business venture/gimmick; Dan is using the kiosk to advertise his bookshop in the High Street and I am hoping to generate some buying opportunities.
We endeavour to keep the shop open at the weekends, weather permitting. A peppercorn rent charged by the council means that the kiosk doesn’t need to be open on weekdays, when we are otherwise busy. And there are a few sunny Sundays. Dan brings along his deck chair based on the original 1935 Penguin book jacket design for The Big Sleep. We take turns in it; relishing a lounge with the Sunday papers. There are even customers to disturb our peace. On colder windy days it is, however, an effort to man the shop; our vigil fortified by tea and scones, courtesy of Vic and Sheila’s tearoom at the far end of the pier. My daughter Emily keeps me company. Finding activities to alleviate her boredom and mine, we fly kites with difficulty, and catch crabs, even the occasional edible one, but they are too small to actually eat.
My fishing line is soon wetted; feathery lures hurled out into the strait to entice the mackerel; the sighting of whitebait giving us encouragement. Anne is missing her fresh fish. (It will be another three years before I take home freshly line caught bass, exchanged for books on the world art of tattoo.) Bait in the water, bait in the kiosk. Angling is an apt analogy for what I do. In casting from the pier, care is needed to avoid the jetty. Ah, the jetty. On the pier’s east side. Grade II listed, I’ll have you know. I know because I get it listed — this resilient narrow stone jetty, some 100 metres in length, sloping downward to the strait. Seaweed adheres to its roughly coursed stonework and the large blocks that form its surface. History resides in its architecture. And poetry too.
The jetty was marked as a pier on the 1831 Ordnance Survey map of the area, and is probably the site of an early crossing point to Anglesey. Garth Ferry was an important crossing point before the construction of the Menai Bridge in 1826. A ferry continued to operate from this jetty until the 1960s. I am given to ruminating on the jetty. Before long, I’m fantasising of re-establishing a ferry service between Garth Jetty and Beaumaris. I know a man with a boat licensed to carry passengers. But the council is decidedly unenthusiastic. You can only fantasise so much. Dan and I decide not to renew the lease.
A week preceding the kiosk’s closure, a young woman asks me for ‘that poem in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film.’ Having no Auden in the kiosk I give her directions to Dan’s shop.
The pier has an awe-inspiring panorama of wave, wood and mountain. Fixed to the benches are memorial plaques with touching inscriptions. ‘In loving memory Florence Magdalen Feasy who swam the Menai Strait in 1929, aged 15’. ‘Capt Marcel Le Comte 1938–2007 A true Garth boy Son of Henri and Gladys.’
Wind whistling through the shrouds in the boat yard is good for the lamentation of the soul. And for sheer power nothing beats Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last Prince.
Prades, Pyrenees, 1995
We drive to the Pyrenees via Carcassonne. Consuming several cloves of garlic in a cassoulet there has undesirable consequences. In the night the garlic will seep out from my every pore, much to everyone’s disgust. Fortunately, by the time we call on a newsagent in Prades, a small town perched high in the Pyrenees, my body hasn’t yet worked out a purging strategy for garlic overdose. It might have undermined the business proposal.
I have compiled a 200-book collection of holiday reads; best sellers in the main, including plenty of thrillers. The newsagent is open-minded; perfectly willing to take the books on sale or return basis. We agree to go halves on a standardised sale price of three francs.
Two weeks later I descend the Pyrenees, from near the Spanish border, on a little yellow train in an open-air carriage. We pass through little villages clinging to the rocky hillside, narrow gorges and tiny valleys. This scenic narrow gauge petit train jaune connects with a standard gauge service at Villefranche, the terminus for main-line trains from Perpignan. En route, I call on the Prades newsagent to learn that she has sold 108 books. In addition to English tourists, she tells me that Dutch and Germans are also buying.
Correze, November 1996
We take turns driving to Correze in a hired van. Brian, my new business partner, is in good form; his conversation is a strange mix of the sublime and the obscene. Brian’s true passion is classical music and much of the four-hour journey is spent with Bach. We make appreciative sighs as the landscape rushes by until we venture up the driveway to a large farmhouse. Waiting to greet us is a self-described American aesthete and owner of one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. I break the news that I don’t have the confidence or contacts to handle his piece de resistance or his facsimile reproduction of the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Codices. I offer to buy his First Edition of Chatwin’s In Patagonia but he is reluctant to accept less than £250 for it. We agree, however, to a price on the paperbacks; a one thousand strong collection of modern literature, in tip top condition, in which there is a fair sprinkling of cult titles and books with a high ‘novelty’ factor (always a big plus) like Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle.