The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 27 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 4

Books found: 1

On my sister’s advice, I checked TripAdvisor to see whether anyone had reviewed the shop. There were nine reviews, two of which made references to the quality of the food. We do not serve food. We have never served food. Two more complained that the shop ‘wasn’t as big’ as they had expected it to be.

Inspired, I wrote a ridiculous review praising the owner’s magnificent good looks, convivial charm, captivatingly beautiful scent, the wonderful stock, the electric atmosphere and a litany of other unlikely superlatives. In no time at all it had been removed and TripAdvisor had sent a threatening email warning me not to do it again. I went straight back onto their site and wrote another one, and encouraged the shop’s Facebook followers to do the same.

After lunch I checked eBay to find that the book signed by Sir Walter Scott sold for £250, so I emailed the winning bidder and sent them an invoice. It’s easy to miss things like important signatures or inscriptions in books when you’re buying, but equally so when you’re selling. Once, shortly after I bought the shop, I bought ten boxes of books unseen from another dealer, a man called David McNaughton, who had been in the trade for nearly forty years. He wanted £10 a box and assured me that it was reasonable stock. From previous dealings with him I had no reason to doubt this. What I didn’t expect, though, was to find a book signed by Florence Nightingale, dedicated to one of her nurses. It was a Charles Kingsley title – I forget which. Florence Nightingale was fond of inscribing books and giving them to her friends, and consequently there are quite a few of these about, but it still made £300 on eBay. A nurse in Missouri bought it. I sent David a case of wine and told him what had happened. Sadly, he died a few years ago. He was among the last of a generation of what can now be seen as traditional book dealers. Before the days of Amazon and AbeBooks – web sites to which one may quickly refer to check prices – booksellers would have to acquire and carry about all of that information, and David was a mine of biographical, bibliographical and literary information. Now this knowledge – accumulated over almost a lifetime, once so valued and from which a good living could be earned – is all but useless. Those dealers who could tell you the date, publisher, author and value of a book just by looking at it are few and far between, and their ranks are shrinking daily. I still know one or two of them, and they are among the people I admire most in the trade. Without exception, all of those I encountered and had dealings with – from what now feels like a bygone era of bookselling – were honest and decent.

There was a stray cat in the Scottish room as I was closing up. It hissed and leapt through the cat flap as I chased it out.

Till total £11

3 customers