The Diary of a Bookseller

JANUARY

A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’

On this part of his essay, I have to concede that I have some sympathy with Orwell. While I still love books, they no longer have the mystique that they once had – with the exception of antiquarian books illustrated with hand-coloured copperplate engravings or woodcuts. Once I had in my possession Lilies, eight hand-coloured bound plates from Thornton’s Temple of Flora. I doubt whether I shall ever see so beautiful a book again. It was in an elderly widow’s house in Ayrshire. I had gone through the books she was selling – a thousand or so – and found very little of value or even of interest until when, just as I was about to leave, I spotted the book leaning against a table leg in the dining room. I asked if she would mind if I had a look at it, as I had never seen a copy before. When I told her what it was worth, she asked me if I could sell it for her (I confessed that at the time buying it was beyond my means), so I took it home, had some minor repairs done to it by a local binder and consigned it to Lyon & Turnbull’s Edinburgh saleroom, where it realised somewhere in the region of £8,000.

Even the octavo set of Audubon’s Birds of America that briefly fell into my possession (one of the holy grails for any bookseller) could not come close to that. Such things will never lose their appeal. And while there is always the thrill of the chase as I approach a house whose library I might buy, and have not yet seen, I read little compared with my life before I bought the shop, unless I am travelling by train or plane. In those journeys I am free from the distractions that punctuate my daily life and can immerse myself completely in a book. When I read James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which I started and finished on a train journey to London to see Anna, I clearly remember emerging from Hogg’s extraordinary world, blinking and stunned into Euston station – more disorientated by the place than ever.

During a negotiation over the price of a private library with a seller, the collection assumes the appearance of a glittering prize. The moment that a price is agreed, hands are shaken and the cheque has left my hand, the books instead become a great weight which I have to box up, load into the van, unload and then check, list online, price up and put on the shelves before I will see a penny of my investment returning. The distaste to which Orwell refers happens the moment the books enter your possession – they suddenly become ‘work’ – but that unease is more than matched by the extraordinary pleasure afforded by the rare and exquisite joy of handling a book like Thornton’s Lilies.