Cat) taking on Amazon
another elderly visitor mistaking E. L. Jamesfor M. R. Jameswhile discussing horror fiction with her friend. ‘She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked when she gets home with the copy of Fifty Shades Of Grey she bought,’ he notes.
Some of the most poignant passages refer to the daily trips out to appraise collections being offered up by elderly folk who can no longer cope with independent living.
‘Clearing a deceased estate is always a melancholy time,’ he writes. ‘Dismantling the collection seems to be the destruction of their character — the last piece of evidence of who they were.’
Sadly, the sentence Bythell hears most often these days is: ‘It ’s cheaper on Amazon ’, usually muttered sotto voce by customers who, having used the premises as a free browsing facility , will inevitably return home to order their selection online.
Who’d be a bookseller nowadays? Well, he, for one; for despite it all, you sense Bythell’s life is both fulfilled and fulfilling.
In between minding the shop, he goes fishing for salmon and drinks whisky late into the night with old friends. He also helps to run the annual Wigtown Book Festival, which has mushroomed from a rackety little affair some 20 years ago to become a thriving cultural (and commercial) opportunity for the area.
Indeed, so rich is his life nowadays that he rarely has time to read.
Warm, witty and laugh- out-loud funny, this gently meandering tale of British eccentricity will stay long in the memory.