The Diary of a Bookseller

MONDAY, 10 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 8

Books found: 7

Among the orders was one for the Pebble Mill Good Meat Guide.

Because we put through a reasonable volume of mail we have a contract with Royal Mail, and rather than take the parcels to the counter in the post office for Wilma, the postmaster, to deal with, we process them online, and every day either Nicky or I will take the sack of franked packages over to the post office’s back room, where they are picked up and taken to the sorting office.

The post office in Wigtown, like so many rural post offices, is part of another shop, and ours is a newsagent/toyshop owned by a Northern Irishman called William. Whatever the opposite of a sunny disposition is, William has it. In spades. He never smiles, and complains about absolutely everything. If he is in the shop when I drop the mail bags off, I always make a point of saying good morning to him. On the rare occasions that he bothers to make any sort of response, it is inevitably a muttered ‘What’s good about it?’ or ‘It might be a good morning if I wasn’t stuck in this awful place.’ Generally, the breezier the greeting you salute him with, the more hostile his response will be. As a measure of the depth of his personal well of human misery, he tapes all the magazines in the display stand with three pieces of sellotape so that it is impossible for customers to flick through them. Wilma, in marked contrast, is witty, bright and friendly. The post office is really the hub of Wigtown’s community – everyone goes there at some point during the week, and it is where gossip is exchanged and funeral notices are posted.

After lunch the till roll ran out, so I went to look for more and it appears that we have completely run out, so I ordered another twenty rolls, which should see the machine through for two or three years. Hopefully fewer, if business picks up.

Two new subscribers to the Random Book Club today. The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

Till total £119.99

11 customers