The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 22 MAY

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

The first customer of the day was an Australian woman whose inability to pronounce the letter T left me confused as to whether she was asking for ‘Noddy books’ or ‘naughty books’. It turned out, after I’d shown her to the erotica section, that she was after Enid Blytons.

It is a strange phenomenon that, when customers visit the shop for the first time, they tend to walk very slowly through it, as though they are expecting someone to tell them they have entered a forbidden zone, and when they decide to stop, it is invariably in a doorway. This, of course, is incredibly frustrating for anyone behind them, and since that person is usually me, I exist in a state of perpetual frustration. Anthropologists insist that it is an instinctive human response on entering a new space to stop and look around for potential danger, although quite what sort of danger might be lurking in a bookshop – other than a frustrated bookseller whose temper has been frayed to the point of violence by the fact that somebody is blocking the doorway – is a mystery.

Two customers asked what had happened to the spirals of books. The book spirals were large columns of books that were piled in a helix and coated with fibreglass resin. They stood on each side of the door into the shop. Last year some children tried to set fire to one of them – unsuccessfully, as the resin eventually cracks and the rain gets in. I have asked Norrie to make a new pair out of concrete in time for the festival in September.

Till total £324.49

20 customers