The Diary of a Bookseller
by Shaun Bythell
(London: Prolific Books, 2017)
Bookshops are now scarce, and stock is plentiful. It is a buyer’s market. Even when things were good back in 2001 - the year I bought the shop - the previous owner valued the stock of 100,000 books at 30,000.
Page 4.
He is smartly enough dressed inasmuch as his clothes are clearly well cut, but he does not wear them well: there is little attention to detail such as shirt tails, buttons or flies. It appears as though someone has loaded his clothes into a cannon and fired them at him, and however they have landed upon him they have stuck.
Page 5.
It weighs heavily upon my faith in human decency when customers - offered a discount on products that are already a fraction of their original cover price - feel entitled to demand almost 30 percent further off.
Page 6.
The total for the number of customers may also be misleading - it is not representative of footfall, merely of the number of customers who buy books. Normally the footfall is around five times the figure for the number who buy.
Page 6.
Collections that focus on a single subject are usually desirable, as buried among them will almost certainly be a few scarce items of interest to collectors, and usually valuable. Theology is probably the only exception to this rule.
Page 7.
More often than not people want to dispose of the entire collection, particularly when it is a deceased estate.
Page 10.
Going through the books of the person who has died affords an insight into who that person was, their interests and, to a degree, their personality.
Page 11.
Very few booksellers think anything positive about Amazon, but it is, sadly, the only shop in town when it comes to online selling.
Page 16.
Customers are inclined to move books, and occasionally we are unable to find them and fulfil orders.
Page 22.
One of the principal pleasures of self-employment is that you don’t have to do what the boss tells you. As Amazon marches on with its ‘everything shop’ crusade, it is slowly but certainly becoming the boss of the self-employed in retail.
Page 23.
The number of books printed in the UK each year had increased, the number of titles has diminished: more copies of fewer books. The book market is now controlled not by publishers but by the buyers for Waterstones and Tesco and other ‘combines’, as Orwell would have called them.
Page 24.
When is set up the Facebook account focus on customer behaviour, particularly the stupid questions and the rude comments.
Page 27.
The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall - the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris - evoke a kind of melancholy that in not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character - you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books, in the same way that people who lost a child often can’t bear to remove anything from their bedroom for years.
Page 29.
Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are and have no intention of buying anything.
Page 30.
Those dealers who could tell you the date, publisher, author and value of a book just by looking at it are few and far between, and their ranks are shrinking daily.
Page 32.
Really bookish people are a rarity, although there are vast numbers of those who consider themselves to be such.
Page 35.
When I go to a house to buy books, there is an anticipation unlike anything else. It is like casting a net and never knowing what you will find when you gather it in. I think that book dealers and antique dealers probably have the same sense of excitement when following up a call.
Page 35.
I deeply dislike security cameras and would rather lose the occasional book than have that sort of intrusive monitoring in the shop.
Page 37.
The idea of a Book Town originated with Richard Booth in the 1970s. He convinced booksellers to move to the Welsh Marches town of Hay-on-Wye, testing the theory that a town full of bookshops would encourage people to visit, and the economy could be re-invigorated. It worked.
Pages 38-39.
There must be some kind of psychological effect created by finding an unpriced book. Whatever price you suggest when asked, however low, seems to be more than the customer is prepared to pay.
Page 40.
It often strikes me that perhaps bookshops primarily play a recreational role for the most people, being peaceful, quiet places from which to escape the relentless rigours and digital demands of modern life.
Page 47.
One person’s good book is another person’s bad book; the matter is entirely subjective.
Page 63.
Plenty of booksellers specialise. I don’t. The shop has as wide a range of subjects and titles as I can cram into it. I hope that there’s something for everybody, but even with 100,000 titles in stock many people still leave empty-handed.
Page 63.
Books about railways are probably the best-selling subject in the shop, something I could never have imagined when I bought the business fifteen years ago.
Page 65.
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 Pajamas, 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 hum, 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.
Page 68.
When you deal with large numbers of different people every day, you start to notice behavioural patterns. One of the more curious for me is to see what people laugh at. … quite often it is something that isn’t the slightest bit amusing that triggers laughter. … sometimes it appears to be used as a sort of punctuation mark to denote the end of a sentence. … Nor is laughter particularly confined to humour; speakers tend to laugh 20 per cent more than their audiences.
Pages 69-70.
Often, even after you’ve told customers that you do not have a copy of the book they’re looking for in stock, they will insist on telling you at great length and in tedious detail why they’re looking for that particular title. A few possible explanations for this have occurred to me, but the one by which I am most convinced is that it is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. They want you to know that this is a subject about which they are informed, and even if they are wrong about whatever they’ve chosen to pontificate on, they drone on - normally at a volume calculated to reach not only the cornered bookseller but everyone else in the vicinity too.
Pages 72-73.
The phenomenon of the best-seller in the publishing industry does not seem to translate into the same financial cash cow in the second-hand book industry.
Page 83.
What passes for a best-seller in the new book market is precisely the sort of book that will be a dog in the second-hand trade. Customers often fail to understand this and think that their first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is worth a fortune, when in fact 12 million of them were printed. As an author’s success and fame increase, so too will the size of the print runs of their successive books.
Page 83.
The immersive capacity of a good novel to transport you into a different world is unique to the written word.
Page 87.
It is hard to predict what customers will buy, although the number of men who head straight to the railway section is uncanny.
Page 87.
There is a certain kind of customer who delights in pointing out that a book is in the wrong section, as if they’re showing you that they know more about books than you do. More often than not, when a book is in the wrong section, it is because a customer has put it there, not a member of staff.
Pages 121-122.
Boxes of fresh stock attract customers like moths to a flame.
Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 books neatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be rifling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock I extraordinary. Obviously the idea of finding a bargain is part of it, but I suspect it goes well beyond that and has parallels with opening gifts.
Page 126.
The peaks and troughs of the business follow the timing of school holidays.
Page 134.
There is an instinct that appears common to all boys of four years old when presented with a shelf of books, the spines neatly lined up with the edge of the shelf. They seem incapable of resisting the urge to push them back as far as they can, against the back of the bookcase. The sight of a neatly lined row of books is irresistible to small boys, and they can no more control their desire to make a mess of them than they can suppress the urge to pull a cat’s tail or jump in a puddle.
Page 147.
I really ought to be less dismissive of customers and people selling books.
Page 167.
It gives me a glimmer of hope for the future of bookselling, though, to see a child reading, their attention rapt in the book to the total exclusion of everything else.
Page 186.
The most lucrative trade at book fairs takes place between dealers as they’re setting up stall, before the public comes in.
Page 186.
The cost of travel, accommodation and the stall and the pitiful prices that people are prepared to pay for books these days have made all but the top-end fairs almost entirely financially unviable.
Page 186.
Increasingly customers are using the shop merely as a browsing facility, then buying online.
Pages 194-195.
In non-fiction - with a few exceptions - it barely makes any difference what edition a book is, yet people still cling to the notion that first editions are somehow imbued with a magical and financial value.
Page 214.
I can afford to be rude back to customers - it’s my shop, nobody is going to fire me - but most people who work in shops are not in this position, and to exploit that by not showing them the slightest courtesy is something that offends me greatly. And while I do make observations about the appearance of some of my customers, they are just observations - not judgements. In most cases.
Page 222.
Prefacing a sentence with ‘I don’t want to appear rude, but …’ flags up the same alarm bells as ‘I am not racist, but …’ It’s quite simple: if you don’t want to appear rude, don’t be rude. If you’re not a racist don’t behave like a racist
Page 225.
On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before - and with no sense of irony - putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.
Page 232.
The few people who give second-hand books as gifts for Christmas are usually eccentric.
Page 262.
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.
Page 274.
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.
Page 274.
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.
Page 281.
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.
Page 282.
Who knows whose hands have touched the books in the shop? Doubtless everyone from ministers to murderers. For many that secret history of provenance is a source of excitement which fires their imagination. A friend and I once discussed annotations and marginalia in books. Again, they are a divisive issue. We occasionally have Amazon orders returned because the recipient has discovered notes in a book, scribbled by previous readers, which we had not spotted. To me these things do not detract but are captivating additions - a glimpse into the mind of another person who has read the same book.
Page 293.
It is always seen as the curse of the teacher, being exposed to germy children and constantly being ill, but it applies equally to anyone who works in a shop. Customers enjoy sharing their ailments with us.
Page 296.
This life is infinitely preferable to working for someone else.
Page 307.