The Diary of a Bookseller

SEPTEMBER

We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

The children’s section of the shop is always a mess. No amount of tidying will keep it neat for more than a day or two, although we maintain the Sisyphean effort of trying to keep it so. As much as I’d like to blame the children who make it a mess, I suppose it’s just what children do. It gives me a glimmer of hope for the future of bookselling, though, to see a child reading, their attention rapt in the book to the total exclusion of everything else. In general, it appears – in my shop at least – that girls are more committed readers than boys. It was certainly something in which I had a limited interest as a child. Neither boys nor girls ever pick up Barrie, though. Of the Scottish writers of that period only Stevenson and Buchan seem to have stood the test of time, still selling well in the shop.

Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books are good sellers too, but to collectors rather than children. I once bought a set of them from another dealer, and took them to a book fair (another part of the trade that, with a few notable exceptions, appears to be exhaling the last rattling gasp of its dying breath). The most lucrative trade at book fairs takes place between dealers as they’re setting up stall, before the public comes in. This was no exception, and – less than a week after I had bought them for £400 – I sold the set of Lang’s Fairy Books for £550 to another bookseller at the Lancaster Book Fair. Since then I have not gone to another fair. The cost of travel, accommodation and the stall and the pitiful prices that people are prepared to pay for books these days have made all but the top-end fairs almost entirely financially unviable.