More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Princess in the Castle,
The Religious Tract Society was established in 1799 with the intention of evangelising women, children and the poor.
Highways and Byways.
The War of the Worlds
Anna’s version of reality is very much that of a romantic American who has watched too many Ealing comedies. I think in her imagination the Queen regularly has people like us around for tea parties.
We drove home via Prestwick airport to pick up Emanuela, the Italian woman who has volunteered to work in the shop for the summer. Prestwick is not known for its glamour. Even its slogan (‘Pure dead brilliant’) hardly evokes the sophisticated world of international air travel. I’ve often ruminated on the wisdom of the person who signed off on an airport using the word ‘dead’ in its marketing brand.
R. F. D. Country! Mailboxes and Post Offices of Rural America.
Lucky Jim
took Emanuela to the post office to show her where to leave the bags with the online orders, and to meet Wilma, the wonderful woman who works there. On the way back Emanuela pronounced, ‘Wow, thees are amazing. It not just a post-a office. It sell-a everyfink.’ As we were passing the chemist, there was a man outside telling his poodle that no, he couldn’t go in there because dogs aren’t allowed. But he’s still a very good boy, apparently. Emanuela petted the poodle in Italian.
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 and I had a discussion about the condition of second-hand books. From my perspective as a dealer, I like them to be in as good a condition as possible, but Granny has a different, and more interesting view. She told me, ‘I like to read-a books-a which have been read by many, many people. I love-a the folded corners of books-a because it makes me wonder what caused the person to stop-a reading at this point? What-a happened? Did the cat need-a to be fed? Did the police-a knock on the door-a to tell you that your husband had been killed? Or did you just need-a to go for a piss? All of
...more
In the old days the girls (students) would turn up regardless of how hungover, or even still drunk, they were. I’m hard pressed to remember a day when her predecessor, Sara Pearce, failed to turn up to work under some form of intoxication. I never thought that I’d miss her. I once came down into the shop after lunch to find that she had taken a photograph of herself, framed it and written ‘Employee of the Month’ on it. It was sitting proudly on the counter.
Still, the smell, the atmosphere and the human interaction will remain the exclusive preserve of bricks-and-mortar bookshops. Perhaps, like vinyl and 35mm film, there might be a small revival, enough to keep a few of us afloat for a bit longer.
The New Confessions
In the shop I have a quotation from Erasmus painted on a wall which reads ‘Whenever I have money I buy books. Whatever is left I spend on food and clothes.’
Wanderlust for Books,
Lucky Jim.
Flo in. Blackboard for the day was a quotation from As You Like It, accompanied by a fairly competent chalk sketch of Shakespeare saying, ‘I like this place and willingly could waste time in it.’
Telephone call after lunch from Ian, a fellow bookseller from Hull, asking me if I’ve ever been reported to Amazon for selling a ‘banned book.’ Apparently they’d been in touch to rebuke him for selling a history of the Second World War that had a swastika on the cover (almost all books about the Second World War have a swastika on the cover). When he asked them for a list of banned books, they told him that there was no such list, and that they react when notified by a complaint from a customer. Ian—quite fairly—asked them how booksellers could be expected to know what is going to cause
...more
Anna’s book about coming to live in Wigtown, Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets.
Customers from anywhere south of Manchester tend to demand English notes in their change. Callum once told me that when he paid for tobacco in a petrol station in England with a Scottish £20 note the man behind the counter in the shop made a great show of holding it up to the light to check for a watermark, tutting all the while. When Callum received his change, which contained an English £10 note, he did the same thing.
Overheard a couple in the Writers’ Retreat: Her: Can we drink as much of this wine as we like? Him: Yes, let’s drink as much as we can. According to Twigger, this is the mentality of most writers to anything that’s free, but particularly food and wine.
The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks;
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby; A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving; The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson; Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez;
A man, who I assume was the children’s father, asked ‘Is it called The Bookshop because it’s full of books?’ How do these people feed themselves?
Customers don’t try to negotiate at the petrol pump, or the supermarket whose owners and shareholders make millions, if not billions in profits, but it seems that it is acceptable to try to screw the profit out of struggling small businesses at a time when everybody is fully aware that we’re up against it thanks to, well, you know who by now.
Death at Intervals,
Blindness,
Edinburgh Revisited
How depressing that his first instinct was to leave negative feedback, rather than try to resolve the problem with me.
The Master and Margarita. Granny told me that I would love it, and if the first hundred pages are anything to go by, that’s an understatement. I am transfixed.
couldn’t help thinking that Jeff Shepherd would be a great name for a one-man Def Leppard tribute band, possibly with a sheepdog.
The Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway.
When I asked her why she was incapable of keeping the place tidy, she called me a ‘fussy old woman.’
Scottish Ghost Stories,
For all my scepticism and conviction that this is no more than a coincidence (the landing was where Joyce told me that ‘George’ liked to conduct his ghoulish activities), this is now the third time that someone has mentioned the stairs as the site of supernatural activity. I remain unconvinced but slightly unsettled.
It’s a month until the shortest day of the year. Most people I know dread January, but for me the worst time of year is between September and December: the fishing season is over, it becomes colder and wetter, and the days shorten until some days it feels like there has been no light at all. At least January is redeemed by the lengthening days.
Obligatory telephone call with The Pensions Regulator this morning in which they asked for my email address: Me: M A I L @ T H E - B O O K S H O P dot C O M. Her: So, that’s nail@the-bookshop.com. Me: No, M A I L. Her: Right, so nail@the-bookshop.com. Me: Yes, just send it to nail@the-bookshop.com. I’m going to ignore it anyway.
Just before lunchtime an elderly Yorkshireman came to the counter with three books about fishing, all fairly scarce. The total came to £66 and on being told this he demanded my ‘best price,’ so I told him that the best price for me would be £100.
Dark Estuary
My mother appeared at 4 p.m. with the couple who are running The Open Book this week. They’re American: she is probably around fifty-five, he looks a bit older. He has a tattoo of a dolphin over his right eye. Went for a drink with them in The Ploughman after work.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.
I had a cup of tea and a chat with them before looking at the books, most of which were in agricultural feed sacks, with the more valuable books on the table in the sitting room, including a book signed by Bertrand Russell. I went through about five of the forty sacks to ascertain an average value (hoping that the rest were similar) and wrote them a cheque for £1,300, which was probably considerably more than I ought to have offered. It’s going to take a long time to break even. They helped me load the sacks into the van. Left at 4 p.m., home at 5.30.
This is why I need to run a bookstore. I need to be able to go through other people's books and bring them home by the agricultural sacksful!
a first edition Peter Pan.
‘Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.’
‘I’m from Devon, I’m working up here for a month. The woman who lives next door to me has written a children’s book. She published it herself. It’s not very good. Would you like to stock it?’
I bought Jimmy Clitheroe’s library steps from her for £20.
British Birds,
The Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway
A customer came in at eleven o’clock and asked for ‘religious books,’ so I pointed him at the theology section. After about a minute he returned to the counter and asked, ‘Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?’
