The Diary of a Bookseller

FRIDAY, 15 AUGUST

Online orders: 3

Books found: 0

Katie was in today, covering for Nicky.

Monsoon was down again, so we couldn’t access the locator codes to find the books that have been ordered, the title of one of which was He Was Born Gay, by Emlyn Williams.

After lunch I left for Haugh of Urr, a tiny village about thirty-five miles away, to look at a book collection. They were in a very pretty, small whitewashed cottage. The place was a mess, but full of beautiful antique furniture and paintings, and a mixed collection of books. There wasn’t much exceptional material, and a lot of the better books were mouldy and water-damaged from a flood in March, but I found a copy of Don Quixote from 1755 in two volumes and some A. A. Milne firsts. The books, paintings and furniture had come from a stately home, and had been divided among the family when the bigger house was sold. They looked out of place in the tiny cottage and had clearly been bought with a far grander location in mind. The old man was there with his grandson, and said very little. I noticed that I had the same trainers as his grandson, and when I pointed this out to him, he looked horrified. Left with twelve boxes of books and wrote the old man a cheque for £525.

I returned to the shop to find a list of things to do left by Katie before she went home, including ‘Fix Monsoon’. This is becoming far too frequent a problem, and it is probably time to look into an alternative system. It is now inoperable about 25 per cent of the time, and although the tech support is good, they are based in Oregon and so are eight hours behind us. Conveniently, they start work as I am closing up.

Till total £217.98

26 customers