The Diary of a Bookseller

FRIDAY, 4 APRIL

Online orders: 3

Books found: 1

Three orders, all Amazon; only found one. One of the missing books was Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which Nicky had listed as being on shelf Q6 in the Scottish room, despite its being a book about Afghanistan, written by a man who was born in Hong Kong. Perhaps the Scottish-sounding name confused her. As I was taking the sacks of mail over to Wilma, I bumped into Jock, who used to work in the shop when John Carter owned it. Jock is famous for his long-winded and frankly unlikely stories. They usually involve someone trying to trick him, and then him spotting their ruse and getting the better of them. Almost all of them end up in a fight, which he inevitably wins. He is notoriously difficult to understand both because of his strong accent and dialect, and because he has no teeth. Today he told me about a woman whose garden he works in once a week. According to Jock, she’s not a very good driver because of her poor vision. ‘She’s got carrots in her eyes.’

At 12.15 p.m. a customer telephoned to tell me that he’d bought a book from us which was the first in a ‘triology’. It had cost him £7.20, including postage, and he was very happy with it. He now wants to buy volume II, but our copy of volume II is the only copy available online and is £200, which he wasn’t prepared to pay. He wanted it for the same price as he had paid for volume I. I tried to explain that as ours was the only copy available online it was a much more scarce book, and the price remained at £200. He told me he was ‘disgusted’ and hung up.

Following a conversation with Anna, I am considering organising a Random Book Club event in London – probably a talk by an author, but the audience won’t know who the author will be until the talk starts. I emailed Robert Twigger, and he is happy to help out. Rob is a regular at Wigtown Book Festival, and normally stays in my house for the full ten days. He is a writer, and has won many awards and prizes: his best-known work is probably Angry White Pyjamas, for which he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. He is an adventurer and an explorer, an extremely entertaining man, and I count myself very lucky to know him, and to have him as a good friend. He lived with his family in Cairo until the revolution of 2011, after which they decided to move back to the UK. He now lives in Dorset. During the September book festival last year I noticed that Eliot had unplugged one of my table lamps and had plugged in his Kindle. This was an affront on so many levels that when I pointed it out to Rob, he decided that the best form of revenge was to download a book called Two in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting onto it. I doubt whether his wife was terribly impressed.

Callum and I went for a pint after I had closed the shop, then I nipped to the co-op for some milk. Mike was working, and he looked more than a little sheepish. I asked him how the newly neutered stray cat was settling in, and he told me that he had been verbally abused by a woman yesterday who had come into the co-op and accused him of stealing her cat. Apparently she had been looking for it for weeks, since it had run away. She was not best pleased to hear it has had its balls chopped off.

Till total £103.99

12 customers