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It was a quiet morning, the peace broken at 11 a.m. by a middle-aged woman in a duffel coat who kept shouting at her husband: Woman: Barry! . . . Barry! . . . Barry! Barry: Yes dear? Woman: Barry, have I read Nineteen Eighty-Four? Unsurprisingly, Barry wasn’t sure whether or not she had read it, so she decided not to blow £2.50 on a mint Penguin copy, just in case she had.
The Breaking of Bumbo,
The New Confessions,
Save Your Own Seed.
Cairo to Persia and Back,
La vida breve.
The Bankrupt Bookseller Speaks Again
And the Band Played On.
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.
perhaps the best-known of these in the past few years has been Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, which opened in Bath in 2006, and whose owner, Nic Bottomley, is happy to concede that the considerable tourist footfall of the city lends itself to the continuing success of the business. That, though, is not to detract from the innovative ideas that have sprung from his opening the shop, such as customised reading lists and a ‘reading spa.’
A customer with a ponytail that stuck out near the crown of his head leaving a sort of mullet-style around his neck bought a bookshop bag. I thought twice about selling him one, as I suspect seeing him with it might put more people off than it attracts.
Pinocchio
Good Friday, Bank Holiday.
Funny; Good Friday is not a US Bank holiday.
They always ask for wildfowling books but never buy any of our stock of them, claiming that they’re overpriced, yet when they wish to sell their own books, they expect me to pay considerably more than they’re worth. It’s rare that people selling their books don’t accept what I’m prepared to offer, except with wildfowlers, who seem to have a hugely inflated sense of their value.
She’s been busily job-hunting, but there’s so little industry in the area that most people I know work for themselves.
Easter Bank Holiday.
They take the resurrection of Jesus seriously over there!
Two Sons of Galloway
The Works of Lucy Hutchinson,
Locals around here don’t describe themselves as ‘coming from’ a place; they say that they ‘belong to’ a place, as if it owns them, rather than the other way around.
Dictators’ Homes.
Outrage,
Just after lunch a well spoken teenage girl rushed excitedly to the counter and said, ‘This bookshop is amazing, I’ve just bumped into my best friend’s cousin here. She lives in Dundee and we live in Newcastle.’ There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you’ve been searching for for years, but with people too. Often customers—not locals—will bump into people they know from a totally different walk of life in the shop. I’ve overheard dozens of conversations along these lines.
The Haunting of Hill House,
Marijuana Potency
Marijuana Botany.
Rubaiyat,
An old man approached me as I was pricing up stock and asked, ‘I wonder if you can help me, I’m looking for self-help books.’ I’m almost certain that he failed to see the irony, so I asked him what sort of self-help books he was looking for, to which he replied, ‘I don’t know.’
The only Bible I’ve had that has proved to have some value, and been relatively easy to sell, has been the ‘Breeches Bible,’ an edition of the Geneva Bible published in 1579 (preceding the King James Bible), and so known because Genesis Chapter III Verse 7 reads: ‘Then the eies of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.’
The Camper’s Hand Book,
I have devised a new strategy for dealing with hagglers. When they ask for a discount, I’m going to ask them what they do for a living. Based on some spurious guesswork, I’ll judge whether they earn more than I do, or less. In the extremely unlikely event that they earn less, they can have a 10 per cent discount. In the almost inevitable event that they earn more, they can pay me 10 per cent extra. That’s progressive economics.
Georgian London,
‘Othello,’
Lancaster
The Mystical Flora of St Francis de Sales,
R. M. Williamson did it in Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904; Will Y. Darling did it in The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller in 1931; Orwell did it in “Bookshop Memories”; and Augustus Muir did it with Baxter in 1942. And, in a more generous manner, Jen Campbell did it with Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012.
very broadly speaking—people can be divided into two groups: those who have worked in a bar, or café, or restaurant, or shop, and those who have not. And while it would be both unfair and untrue to say that everyone in the latter category treats those in the former as a second-class citizen, it is probably accurate to say that virtually nobody from the first category will do so.
The Galloway Highlands.
Mochrum: The Land and Its People,
Blake and Mortimer (17
Adèle Blanc-Sec
About the House:
A man with a Crocodile Dundee hat and a white goatee which he’d dyed blue picked up a copy of Tripe Advisor, read a bit, chuckled and told his friends, ‘That appeals to my sense of humour,’ before putting it back and buying a book about child abuse.
Often when they’re selling books, people will tell me that they want their books to ‘go to a good home,’ as though they were a much loved pet or family heirloom. I have no idea whether the books I sell end up in a ‘good home’ or not, and were I to be so particular as to insist, indeed even ask my customers if they had a ‘good home’ to take the books to, I suspect I’d lose a great deal of business.
The 100 Most Pointless Things in the World
I’m going to try to persuade her that we shouldn’t be considering penny listings, but instead think of what the book would cost if it was brand new today, and divide that by three.
Diary,
Time’s Arrow,
Municipal Buildings of Edinburgh,
Antar, the FV12000 Series British Army Service—a
I normally read a book right through once I’ve started it, but I appear to be interspersing this with other books. Perhaps I’m subconsciously trying to make it last longer.
