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I would probably still be ignorant of the fact to this day. It is an irony of my position that – although I’m surrounded by books every day – most of what I know about them is imparted by customers, the self-same customers whom my first instinct is to discourage from talking.
I’d bought a life-size skeleton which I’d planned to suspend from the ceiling (I have no idea why, but it’s still there, playing a violin) and which I had temporarily placed sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire, with a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in its bony fingers.
The sole order was for a large, heavy book called Shackleton’s Voyages, a recent title in pristine condition. It sold for £3, and the postage was £13, but it was an Amazon order, so we had to take the hit.
CUTTY-GLIES – a little squat-made female, extremely fond of the male creation, and good at winking or glying; hence the name cutty-glies. Poor girl, she frequently suffers much by her natural disposition: to be short and plain, it seems this is the class of females destined by some infernal law to become prostitutes.
My mother appeared at 11.30 and talked incessantly on a variety of subjects, ranging from wild speculation about the sexuality of the residents of The Open Book (whom she’s having to lunch on Wednesday) to her reasons for clearing the loft (‘so that when we’re dead and buried, you and your sisters won’t have to do all that’).
At 2.30 a woman brought in what she described as ‘antique and collectable’ books. I understood this to mean books about antiques and collectables, but instead it was a plastic crate full of shabby mid-Victorian era fiction – a genre that is almost unsellable in the shop unless it is by someone well known (Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, the Brontës etc.). I bought two purely because they appealed to my puerile sense of humour: The Sauciest Boy in the Service and The Cock-House at Fellgarth.
Kirkpatrick Durham too is an interesting place, if for nothing more than the achievement of its most famous son, Kirkpatrick Macmillan. Born there in 1812, Macmillan is credited with inventing the bicycle, an achievement for which he was widely recognised during his lifetime, but for which he took little credit or acclaim, refusing even to patent the invention.
She had longed for the stretching Scottish summer evenings, when the sun sets at 10 p.m. in June, rather than soon after 6 p.m. for most of the year in those countries. Even when I reminded her of the four o’clock December sunsets in Scotland, she assured me that – for her – it was worth it for the pay-off of the endless evenings in the summer.
Machiavelli’s The Prince, anything by Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, J. D. Salinger, Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Moby Dick, Brave New World, 1984, The Go-Between, anything by Murakami, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier
It is entirely possible that the reason we never seem to be short of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey is that the tendrils of these books don’t reach deeply enough into the souls of readers for them to wish to hang on to the books, so they’re less reluctant to dispose of them. The Catcher in the Rye must surely – over the years since it was first published in 1951 – have been published in greater numbers than Dan Brown, but still we don’t see them in the same numbers being offered for sale in the second-hand book trade.
family of five came in at 3 p.m. The children mauled and pawed their way through the books in the antiquarian section in front of their parents before the father spotted the notice requesting that customers handle the books carefully, read it out loud, then finally told them to stop. It’s extraordinary that thought didn’t enter his head until he’d read the notice. I wonder if he has ‘Remember To Breathe’ etched onto the inside of the lenses of his glasses.
At eleven o’clock a customer came to the counter with a book that was priced at £1. He and his wife then spent four minutes going through all their pockets and purses to scratch the money together. They were 20p short and asked if they could pay the balance on their credit card.
My maternal grandparents, by contrast, spent the war in rural Ireland, a country so recently freed from the shackles of British dominion that it couldn’t even bring itself to recognise the conflict in Europe as a war, preferring instead to refer to it as ‘The Emergency’. While hardly living in luxury, they were – at least – in no danger of being executed for who they were.
Penguin has always been an innovative publisher, and the simple, elegant covers – a single colour with a white band through the middle – as well as their reputation for publishing good books make them still sought after. Each colour on the distinctive covers denotes a different subject, so orange is (usually) fiction, green is crime (the best-selling of the Penguins in my shop), purple is biography, black is classics, pink is travel, and so on.
we both gave one another a copy of a book by Peter York called Dictators’ Homes. I have no doubt that Donald Trump uses it for designing interiors like normal people would use Terence Conran’s House Book.
Tracy called to say that she’s been offered the job at Turnberry. She starts on Wednesday and tells me there are rumours that Donald Trump plans to visit some time soon. Hopefully there’s more truth in those than the rumours that he’s going to run for the US presidency.
At the moment Nicky disappeared for her lunch break, a very elderly man, walking using two sticks to help him get about, bought a copy of a book called Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking.
Of those who ask for theology, the overwhelming majority have Northern Irish accents, doubtless in part because of our geographical proximity to the province where interest in matters theological is kept alive thanks to the fact that for many people there religion, politics and identity are grimly intertwined. More often than not these customers are after post-Reformation literature attacking Rome.
After work I made a short video in the garden about how to upgrade your Kindle to a Kindle Fire. It involved half a gallon of petrol and a box of matches.
Granny appeared wearing a new pair of white archival gloves which she claimed would protect her swollen fingers from the ravages of handling books. When I told her that she looked like Michael Jackson, she called me a ‘fucking bastard’.
