The Diary of a Bookseller

‘My motto is the same as the Roman army: SPQR – small profit, quick return.’

As Jen Campbell points out in The Bookshop Book, following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the first ‘mass market’ books becoming available, ‘Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his shop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.’

There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people.

incunabula (the grandiose name for any printed book published before 1501)

A customer appeared at the counter at 10 a.m. and asked ‘Where are the children’s books?’ I pointed towards the children’s section and replied ‘They’re just through that door there.’ The customer turned 180 degrees from where I’d just pointed and aimed her finger towards the front door of the shop, through which she had – literally seconds earlier – entered the building, and said, ‘What, that door there?’

I was chatting to him and his wife and asked what they were doing in the area. She told me that they were on their way to Larne, to which I replied, ‘Why? It’s an awful place.’ Larne, apparently, is where they live.

Downstairs the big glass windows were boarded up, and the place – once busy – was as silent as the grave, save for the sound of the rain coming through the roof and dripping onto the floor. The optimism of that young Italian man, with his Scottish wife, his thriving business and his young daughter, the courage it took him to move to another country, learn a new language and start a business and a new life could never have anticipated the sad end that fate dealt to his dream. I am quite sure that the two-volume Decameron would have been among the few possessions he brought with him from Italy, and I wonder how long it might have been passed down through his family, only to end that inheritance here in a damp flat in New Cumnock with nobody to pass it on to. But now it will have a new life in the hands of the young woman who bought it today, and who knows what the next few hundred years will have in store for it?

At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.

For the last hour of the day the shop was occupied by a family of six – mum, dad and four girls aged between six and sixteen. When the time came to pay for their books, the mother told me that they had all been out for a walk in the morning and the girls had been miserable, despite the sunny weather. She had asked why they were so unhappy and they replied in unison that all they wanted to do was visit The Book Shop as they hadn’t been here for two years and were really excited about returning. They spent £175 and left with six bags of books. These things happen far too rarely, but when they do they serve as a welcome reminder of why I chose to enter the world of bookselling, and of how important bookshops are to many people.

and the books in this particular case were indeed better but still stock of which I already had an abundance, so I rejected them, primarily because he kept calling me ‘Buddy’.