The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 18 DECEMBER

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

At 10 a.m. the first customer came through the door: ‘I’m not really interested in books’ followed by ‘Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.’ By 10.30 a.m. the will to live was but a distant memory.

When I took the orders over to Wilma, William was regaling a clearly unwilling customer with a joke of such colossal political incorrectness that, if there was a Beaufort scale of these things, it would have been of a magnitude so great that a new scale would have had to be created. I asked Wilma if she could send the postman over tomorrow to pick up the sacks when he does his end-of-day collection.

The fishing books from the Dumfries deal, while not exactly flying off the shelves, are selling notably faster than anything else. This is a common phenomenon, even in a shop of this relatively large size: it is the fresh stock that always moves the fastest. I suppose there is a sense to it, inasmuch as a book that has been on the shelves for a year and has not sold is probably overpriced or lacks any sort of market. It doesn’t feel like that, though; it is almost as though the stock that has just come in actually looks fresher, and the books that have been sitting on the shelves for ages have acquired a certain staleness, rendering them unsellable.

As I was sorting through the boxes of books from Loch Lomond, I found another Sorley MacLean pamphlet signed by Seamus Heaney. The total print run was fifty; I now have two of them. They should make £100 each. Like the Walter Scott signature and the Florence Nightingale inscribed book, there is something that makes you feel connected to those people when you handle material like this. Perhaps the more interesting mystery is that you never know who has handled all the unsigned, un-inscribed books that come into the shop, and what their secret history has been.

We received another email from the Bay Bookshop in Colwyn Bay, Wales. They are closing the shop soon and want to know if we would like to buy the stock. They clearly haven’t had any luck selling it elsewhere. I’ve asked them to email me some photographs.

Till total £184.49

7 customers