The Diary of a Bookseller

DECEMBER

At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

Christmas and the run-up to it is possibly the quietest time of the year in the shop. The business is so dependent on footfall from tourists – of whom there are barely any in December – that we would almost be better-off closing the shop between November and March. The few people who give second-hand books as gifts for Christmas are usually eccentric, though, so it is worth opening purely for the entertainment these characters afford. They are the most interesting customers. And it wouldn’t do to close; if the shop wasn’t open, it would disappoint those few souls who do venture into rural Galloway in the winter months, and they would be unlikely to return another time. Occasionally they spend some money, and the short, cold winter days permit little by way of alternative occupation if I was to close the shop, so it is better to be open on my own and take what slim pickings there are than to be closed and take nothing. The one week for which it is certainly worth opening is that between Christmas and Hogmanay – that’s the week when people return to the area to spend the festive period with their loved ones, whom they quickly discover that they love considerably more from a distance of several hundred miles than they do when confined to the same house as them. During that week the shop is busy, bustling with people who have spent far too much time in close confinement with their kin during the year’s darkest month; desperate for any means of escape, they flock to the shop and while away the hours browsing, and – usually – buying books.