The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

No postcards today.

Nicky has asked if she can have my Facebook password so that she can update the thousand or so people who follow the status updates from her perspective. She has also told me that there is a bit of the new counter area that Callum has built that she doesn’t like and she’s going to remove it the next time I’m away. As always, there was a complete absence of any rational explanation as to why she has taken exception to that particular bit of the counter: ‘I just dinnae like it.’

The winner of last week’s anonymous postcard competition (the prize is a book of their choice, value up to £20) was from London, and the card read: ‘“Do you know Yeats? The wine lodge? No, W. B. Yeats, the poet…” and so to assonance, getting the rhyme wrong.’ Apparently it is a quotation from Willy Russell, who came to the book festival a few years ago.

Isabel came in to do the accounts. She was very taken with the new book spirals.

I reached the point in Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father in which he quotes from the letter I gave him. My surname is often spelled incorrectly, but Andrew’s interpretation of it is very unusual: ‘Bithyll’.

Till total £88

5 customers