Shaun Bythell pictured in The Bookshop, Wigtown, is bestselling author of entertaining diaries (Image: Courtesy Shaun Bythell / New Modern)
It probably won’t come as a great surprise to discover that second-hand bookshops are quiet, calm places. Time stops when you enter one. We don’t earn enough money to be of interest to armed robbers. Most of our customers are retired, or introverts, and – on the whole – the most scandalous things that happen within the shop are more likely to grace the pages of Saga Magazine than Tatler.
It is, though, never dull – provided your barometer of excitement is more attuned to extreme knitting than skydiving. Over the years, when clearing book collections from houses, we have been offered traditional Gypsy caravans, garden gnomes, a periscope from a decommissioned submarine, several cars and six tonnes of manure. None of this, though, can compete with the excitement which unquestionably rippled through the staff at Maggs Bros when a customer walked into their bookshop in London one day in 1916 and offered to sell them the preserved penis of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Nobody has tried to sell us the severed genitals of an exiled emperor. George Orwell worked in a bookshop in London in the 1930s and, in his 1936 essay Bookshop Memories, described his customers as “not quite certifiable lunatics”. Ninety years later, very little has changed, although I’m not sure Orwell ever found a dirty nappy stuffed behind a set of Arthur Ransome first editions, or a dog turd on the floor in the erotica section.
Hard at work at The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland (Image: Courtesy Shaun Bythell)
One thing Orwell certainly didn’t have to deal with was mobile phones. No longer is their use confined to people talking extremely loudly in an otherwise silent space; it is now common to see customers blatantly typing the title of a book they’ve found in our shop into Amazon.
Recently, we’ve had a few customers asking where our café is. We have never had a café, but they refuse to take my word for this, instead pointing at their phones and assuring me that, “according to Google, there’s a café in this bookshop”.
On one occasion, when I went upstairs for lunch, I found a couple sitting at my kitchen table. They had lifted a ‘PRIVATE’ barrier and opened a door that says PRIVATE. The table was piled high with my paperwork, including invoices and bank statements. When I entered the room, the husband looked up from the NHS letter containing my colonoscopy results – which he was reading – and asked what today’s special was.
As well as Orwell’s “not quite certifiable lunatics”, we also have to deal with hagglers. These are people who seem to believe that, despite my threadbare clothes, the freezing temperature in the shop, the leaking windows and the general whiff of poverty, I preside over an empire so obscenely profitable that I can afford to sell my stock at around half the price I’m asking for it.
During the summer, a customer dropped a pile of railway books on the counter and said: “I’ll give you £25 for them.” When I added them up, the total came to £77.
In the middle of negotiations, my children (aged seven and four) ran to the counter, barefoot, asking: “Daddy, can we have something to eat? We’re starving.” Clearly moved by this Dickensian scene of deprivation, and as I was about to offer them a bowl of gruel, he upped his offer to £30.
I wish I could say this is uncommon, but it’s not.
People asking for a “bulk discount” for two books, telling me that it is illegal to charge more than the marked price of 2/6 for a 1938 edition of The Observer’s Book of British Birds which I’m asking £3 for, or – most common of all – asking: “What’s your best price, lad?” are part of the daily grind in the trade of old books. I bet they don’t behave like that in Tesco.
Shaun Bythell’s brilliant Return of the Bookseller Diarist is published on October 8 (Image: New Modern)
In recent years, a new species of visitor has also proliferated: the Instagrammer. They often work in pairs, never say hello or ask permission, and take photos of the shop as though it (and the rest of the world) serves only one purpose – to furnish them with material to feed the voracious appetites of their Instagram followers.
This relationship, though it feels parasitical, is not. They need us, and we need them. They now fill the gap once occupied by paid advertising. For us, their brusque, charmless intrusions can translate into likes on their feeds and ultimately into visits to the shop and – if we’re lucky – the occasional sale.
Bookshops, particularly second-hand bookshops, seem to be the last retail spaces in which there is no sense of urgency – no surveillance, nor any pressure to buy anything. We often find people asleep in the armchairs by the fire when we’re closing. So far, they’ve all woken up when prodded.
Shaun Bythell owns Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop, The Bookshop in Wigtown, and is author of the bestselling memoir, The Diary of a Bookseller. Return of the Bookseller Diarist (New Modern, £25) is published on October 8
