The Diary of a Bookseller

JUNE

There are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

Things have changed a little since Orwell’s day. Perhaps the National Health Service has accommodated the ‘not quite certifiable lunatics’ who dogged his daily life in the bookshop back then or perhaps they’ve found some other equally frugal means of distracting themselves. We have one or two regular customers to whom this description might apply, but far more common today is the customer who will spend a few short minutes in the shop before leaving empty-handed, saying, ‘You could spend all day in this shop’, or the young couple who will find the most inconvenient place in which to park their vast, screaming Panzer of a pram while they sit exhausted in the armchairs by the wood-burning stove. Nowadays, when customers have that ‘aimless’ look about them, it is almost a certainty that it is because they are waiting for the pharmacist (three doors up) to fulfil their prescription or for the garage in Wigtown to call and tell them that their car has passed its MOT test and they can collect it.