The bookworm (and his cat) taking on Amazon
MEMOIR THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER by Shaun Bythell (Profile £14.99) MICHAEL SIMKINS
If, lIke me, you’ve always harboured dreams of one day running your own second-hand bookshop — reading War And Peace over a cup of tea, a cat snoozing on your lap, a fire in the grate, with a steady stream of customers to share your literary passions — Shaun Bythell’s charming, darkly comic memoir will soon disabuse you of any romantic claptrap.
Bythell took over The Bookshop in Wigtown, Galloway, in November 2001, and has now written a chronicle of a year in his life behind the counter.
The shop, Scotland’s largest example, has some 100,000 titles and more than a mile of shelving.
Yet, in addition to the roaring fire and the snoozing cat, Bythell’s memoir also chronicles leaky roofs, truculent, imbecilic customers, missed orders and the daily grind of sorting through tons of assorted titles in a desperate attempt to squeeze a profit out of the tiny segment of the business not steamrollered by all booksellers’ online nemesis — the allconquering Amazon. The book, in diary form, covers a 12-month period starting in february 2014.
Here, we encounter a weird and wonderful cast of oddballs and misfits; none more so than Bythell’s trusty and unpredictable assistant, Nicky. She is also a Jehovah’s Witness and takes mischievous delight in placing copies of Darwin’s The Origin Of Species in the fiction section when her boss isn’t looking.
She, in turn, is constantly pursued by an elderly and dishevelled suitor, nicknamed Smelly kelly, who wears aftershave that could strip wallpaper at 20 paces and ‘which makes the air unbreathable even with the windows open’.
Some of the best fun is to be found in the unlikely book titles requested by visitors — The Reforming Of Useless And Dangerous Horses, Sewage Disposal from Isolated Homes, and liquid Gold: The lore And logic Of Using Urine To Grow Plants.
Nearly as bizarre are the casual visitors, and Bythell is fond of quoting former bookseller George Orwell, who wrote in an essay back in 1936: ‘Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere, but have special opportunities in a bookshop.’
If true, little seems to have changed in the intervening 80 years. Recalling one elderly man who’d spent the afternoon browsing the shelves, Bythell notices that ‘he had removed his false teeth and put them on top of a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography’.
The author also gleefully remembers
another elderly visitor mistaking E.L. J ames for M.R . J ames while d iscussing horror fiction with her friend. ‘She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked w hen s he g ets h ome w ith the copy of Fifty Shades Of Grey she bought,’ he notes.
Some of the most poignant p assages refer to the daily trips out t o a ppraise c ollections b eing offeredupbyelderlyfolkwhocan no longer cope withindependent living.
‘Clearing a deceased estate is always a melancholy time,’ he writes. ‘ Dismantling t he c ollection seems to be the destruction of their character — the last piece of evidence of who they were.’
Sadly, t he s entence B ythell h ears most often these days is: ‘It’s cheaper on Amazon’, usually m uttered s otto v oce b y c ustomers who, having used the premises as a free browsing facility, will inevitably return home to order their selection online.
Who’d beabook seller nowadays? Well, he, for one; for despite it all, you sense Bythell’s life is both fulfilled and fulfilling.
In between min ding the shop, he goes f ishing f or s almon a nd d rinks whisky late into the night with old friends. He also helps to run the a nnual W igtown B ook F estival, 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.