The Diary of a Bookseller

WEDNESDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER

Online orders: 2

Books found: 1

Bethan in today, but no Nicky.

I moved the furniture from the big room and set it up for the Writers’ Retreat. Davy Brown, the friend and artist who holds art classes upstairs, arrived and hung his paintings there. They will be there for the duration of the festival. The Writers’ Retreat began in the relative infancy of the festival’s history, when Finn was director of the Festival Company. He had invited – among others – Magnus Magnusson to speak one year. His talk was at 8 p.m. At 6 p.m. he decided to find something to eat. In those early years, when the audiences were relatively small, most of the cafés, pubs and restaurants stopped serving food at 6 p.m. and, unable to find a meal anywhere, Finn called me in desperation and asked if they could come here for something to eat, so I quickly made some soup and a plate of leftovers, and the three of us sat down and had a meal in the house. Afterwards, Finn asked if I would consider keeping a supply of cheese, oatcakes and soup at the ready for the rest of the festival in case such an emergency reoccurred. It did. Several times. After a few years this had grown to the point at which we required a caterer to come in and manage it, and we had official opening hours. Nowadays, we feed up to seventy people on busy days, and at the weekends we treat them to fresh local lobster.

The marquee went up in the town’s central gardens today. More lorries arrived with chairs, flooring, heating and sound equipment, and another marquee. Just two days until the festival starts.

I spent an hour on the phone to UPS and Amazon in an effort to track down the missing six boxes of books we sent up to Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse as part of our FBA shipment, but without any success. I appear to have entered a hellish world of corporate three letter acronyms.

One of the festival volunteers borrowed the van to pick up Astrid’s plywood cut-outs for the festival from her studio in Edinburgh and bring them down here. (Astrid is one of the artists in residence this year.)

This afternoon I made a stage from plywood and timber for Allison’s play. She wanted parquet flooring, so I’ve found some stick-on vinyl and ordered it.

Made a determined effort to plough through And the Ass Saw the Angel and finish it before the festival begins. Just thirty pages to go.

Till total £146.49

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