Bookshops

IAN IRVINE on late-onset bookselling

I never meant to become a bookseller. I had spent my working life, decades of it, as a journalist, which seemed an ideal occupation – lots of stuff happening, so many new things every day, getting to play with all the toys first (books, travel, plays, films) and above all an impressive camaraderie. Undergraduate life had first set the model – a seamless existence where work and social life were inseparable. I’d be gossiping with my tutor about the foibles of our acquaintances at noon and discussing Byronic satire with a friend at midnight.

However, much of the pleasure of print journalism has worn off in recent years as the internet, as with so many other businesses, relentlessly destroyed its revenue, causing endless redundancies, shrinking budgets and closures.

In the summer last year I had just left my latest gig of editing and was casting about for some new billet. I had been thinking of starting a magazine in my native Scotland, when a story in a local south London freesheet caught my eye – the second-hand bookshop in Blackheath Village was for sale. I had lived in Blackheath for nearly 20 years and knew the place well. Though the idea of becoming a bookseller had never occurred before, almost immediately I could see the possibilities. And, for me, The Bookshop on the Heath was an almost ridiculously perfect fit: five minutes from my house, a local institution which had been going since 1949, in a delightful spot overlooking the heath, in the busy heart of the village surrounded by cafés, pubs, and restaurants with constant passing trade. And it was solvent, making a small but consistent annual profit. Reader, I bought it. My shock career swerve into the retail business has been made infinitely easier by my colleague Alicia’s decision to stay. She had been working in the shop for eight years and, indeed, run it for two of them. As well as being a brilliant saleswoman, she was the institutional memory of the shop, knowing everything about it and everyone locally who mattered. I am still in the process of learning the ropes, but after a year, here are a few observations from my early adventures in the book trade.

1. Bookselling is not for the weedy. You require decent upper-body strength and stamina to constantly transport hundreds of boxes of books up and down stairs from houses, flats and storage into your car and out again into your shop. Black Books is one of the funniest sitcoms in decades, but Dylan Moran’s portrayal of a bookseller as a bibulous sloth is far from the truth (mostly).

2. Bookselling is about people. It is possible to sell books entirely online (and we have more than 900 items listed on Abebooks). However, the core of the business remains dealing with customers in the shop and through listening to them being able to steer them in the direction of

‘You require decent upper-body strength and stamina’

books they might like. We have many regular customers with particular enthusiasms – birds, UFOS, art history, 19th-century illustration – and I have learnt a great deal from them.

3. Bookselling is like a social service. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is one of the caring professions, but much of the time when people have books to sell, it is because of some major life event. They might be downsizing from the family home, or they are disposing of the belongings of a recently deceased parent or spouse. And as much as they are trying to get rid of stuff they no longer need or can house, they are often as keen to unburden themselves of the thoughts that seeing the books again inspire. Books are as powerful as any Proustian madeleine for unlocking memory and I hear many gripping and moving life stories.

4. Bookselling is full of surprises. I tell people that I am always happy to look at their books, and it is true. It is worth examining any set of books, no matter how unpromising. The most fascinating things turn up. Sometimes they are valuable – a first edition of an early novel by George Orwell signed by him when he was still putting inverted commas around his pseudonym. That went for a five-figure sum. Sometimes they offer tangible connections with the past – a handsome leatherbound threevolume set of Walter Scott’s Guy

Mannering of 1817 with the bookplate of Brook Edward Bridges. This Kentish vicar was a close friend of Jane Austen – her brother married his sister – and there is a hint that he might even have proposed to her.

5. Bookselling isn’t dead yet. The internet (combined in London with vast rises in rents and rates) has culled a great many second-hand bookshops over the past 20 years, but there remains something undigitisable about the experience of browsing. You may be able to find anything you want on Amazon, but to find books that you don’t know you want, the serendipity of a bookshop is still unbeatable.