The Diary of a Bookseller

MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Nicky was in today. The first business of the morning was an argument about her refusal to co-operate with my request for her to sort through boxes one at a time, and to not leave piles of books randomly distributed around the shop. By the close of the shop there were nine open boxes, and piles of books left in seven locations around the shop. When I pointed this out to her, she blamed customers.

At 11 a.m. I drove to Murray’s Monument with the drone to film a trailer for Stuart McLean for The Dark Outside, an event he set up last year, and for which he invited people to submit previously unheard pieces of music that they had written and recorded. Using an FM transmitter based at Murray’s Monument (a few miles away), he broadcast twenty-four hours of new music to anyone within a four-mile radius. He then destroyed the hard drive on which they were stored, meaning that – essentially – each piece only really existed for that one broadcast.

Anne Brown, former chair of Wigtown Festival Company, has requested some audio pieces for Wigtown Radio, a station that will be broadcasting during the book festival, so this afternoon I went round the square and recorded short interviews with people who work in shops and businesses. Wigtown Radio started last year and runs throughout the festival. It is based in the Martyrs’ Cell in the County Buildings, a tiny vaulted room, and is nearly all live, with a presenter, a producer and a seat-of-the-pants line-up of guests whom the producer has to run out and find during broadcasts while the presenter holds the show together.

Finished As I Lay Dying this evening. A customer saw me reading it this afternoon and suggested that, if I liked it, I might also like Nick Cave’s book And the Ass Saw the Angel. I found a copy in the paperback fiction section and have started on it.

Till total £242.30

18 customers