Confessions of a Bookseller

by Shaun Bythell

Finished The Master and Margarita at midnight, as the howling wind and lashing rain beat at the front of the house. It was nothing like I’d expected, or anything I’d read before. It’s an extraordinary book, the cleverest and most wonderfully evocative use of the supernatural of any book I’ve read, although Hogg’s Justified Sinner might pip it at the post, now that I think about it.

Paula (one of the two Spanish women running The Open Book) came to ask me if I could scan and print copies of a poster that she’s made inviting everyone in the town to come to the shop at 4 p.m. tomorrow to share the Spanish new year tradition of eating grapes.

When I went to the co-op to pick up a loaf of bread after I’d closed the shop, I discovered that people had been panic buying because of the floods (we are officially cut off) and the shelves were completely bare, so I scratched around in the cupboards at home and found flour and yeast, and had a go at making my own. The result was a substance so dense that I suspect I may have created a new element. Periodic table, make space for Bythellium.

The mobile phone signal came back at 11 a.m., but still no Internet connection. What little frustration this is causing me is significantly outweighed by the fact that, since I can’t deal with the orders or list books online, I have the luxury of having little option but to read a book, so I started reading another spoof autobiography, Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself, a book I’d never heard of, but which Anna found in a bookshop in Edinburgh and thought I’d enjoy. This is more like the old days, before the tyranny of the Internet, and it was an enormous pleasure to spend the entire day reading,

Augustus Carp, which so far has proved to be one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Augustus, the narrator of his own life as he sees it, is magnificently pompous, self-righteous and completely hypocritical. He has much in common with Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, and I wonder if John Kennedy Toole had read it before he put pen to paper.

Now that more than 50 per cent of retail purchases are made online, it is unlikely that the trend will reverse, but nobody wants to live in a place where shops are closing all around them and nothing is moving in to fill the void.