The Diary of a Bookseller

WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH

Online orders: 2

Books found: 2

At 10.30 a.m. I went upstairs to make a cup of tea. When I came back downstairs, I was met with a familiar, earthy smell. No sooner had I sat down and started listing books than a short, very scruffy, bearded Irishman shot out from behind a shelf. His appearance (and smell) disguise a man whose knowledge of books is remarkable. He brings me a load of good material about twice a year, delivered in his van, in which he clearly lives. This time he brought four boxes of books on railways and two boxes of books about Napoleon, for which I gave him £170.

At 2 p.m. the telephone rang. It was a woman at the council whose job it is to find work for people with learning difficulties:

Woman: ‘We have a young man looking for work in a bookshop. He has Asperger’s syndrome. Have you heard of Asperger’s syndrome?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Woman: ‘Well, you know how some people with Asperger’s are really good at one specific thing, like maths or drawing?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Woman: ‘Well, he’s not like that.’

So I agreed to take him on for a trial period. He starts on Tuesday.

Before the shop closed I stamped and bagged all the books for the Random Book Club, and (hopefully) charmed Wilma into sending the postman over in his van tomorrow to pick them up.

After years of buying, pricing, listing and selling books, certain publishers become very familiar to you: the significant quantities of books published by Macmillan in the early twentieth century; Blackie and Son with their distinctive Talwin Morris cover illustrations; A. & C. Black, with their famous Scottish travel guides; Fullarton and Cassell, two short-lived publishers who along with Newnes and Gresham embraced the technological revolution that enabled paper to be made from wood pulp in the mid-nineteenth century, and all of whose publications are distinctive for their waxy pages; Ward Lock, with their series of red travel guides to the UK; David & Charles, of Newton Abbot, whose books on regional railways are second to none; Hodder and Stoughton, who published the once desirable King’s England series, now no longer sought after; and Nelson, whose red cloth editions of John Buchan’s works still sell in healthy numbers.

Others stand out less for their design or style, and more for their content. Take Hooper and Wigstead, the publisher of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, whose pages contain the very first version to appear in a book of Burns’s Tam o’Shanter; William Creech, who published Sir John Sinclair’s first Statistical Account of Scotland – and introduced the word ‘statistic’ to the English language; John Wilson, who produced the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect; John Murray, the publisher of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; William Strahan, who brought Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations to the world.

More recent publishers have had a similar impact: Penguin, whose unexpurgated British edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw them end up in court; Shakespeare & Company, who dared to publish Ulysses; small presses such as William Morris’s short-lived Kelmscott Press; and the Golden Cockerel Press, for whom the artist Eric Gill (the typeface designer behind Gill Sans, Perpetua and others) designed a typeface which he named after the press. The list goes on, but these publishers – these individuals – took risks and brought new ideas to the world, each with their own distinctive style, from their subject matter to their design, typography and production values.

Till total £131.33

10 customers