‘I don’t want to adapt. I don’t want to run a cafe. I want to run a bookshop’
Since 2001, Shaun Bythell has run The Book Shop in Wigtown, battling the challenge of Amazon to continue trading and selling, as he recounts in his new book, Confessions of a Bookseller
My stock, like most second-hand booksellers, comes mostly from people who are downsizing, or clearing deceased estates
Wigtown, for those who know nothing of it (and that is pretty much everyone) is a small town in Galloway, rural south-west Scotland. Galloway is arguably the most overlooked corner of the country. In the preface to his wonderful book Highways and Byways of Galloway and Carrick (1916), the Rev. C H Dick describes it as ‘a district which has remained unknown to the world longer than any other part of Scotland with the possible exception of the island of Rockall’, and so it remains. For the few visitors who take the trouble to come here, this is precisely where its charm resides. It is cut off on its northern border by a range of hills, and everywhere else by 180 miles of coastline, comprising cliffs, sandy beaches, and winding rivers. There has never been any heavy industry and – with the exception of the council – there are no big employers. Most people work for themselves in a society of interdependency.
When I bought The Bookshop in Wigtown nearly 20 years ago I knew nothing of business, and very little of books other than being a keen reader. The economy was booming, and online selling was in its infancy with Abebooks being the main player for secondhand
and antiquarian stock. More importantly, Amazon was only selling new books. Selling old books was a pretty decent way of making a living, albeit a relatively modest one. That landscape today seems laughably unfamiliar. The financial punch in the chest of 2008 and the gradual creep of Amazon into every aspect of retail have turned many businesses, including mine, upside down (if you want an insight into Jeff Bezos’s approach to business, Google ‘relentless.com’ and see where it takes you).
When I bought the business in 2001 there were loose ‘rules’ to bookselling. Paperbacks were £2, hardbacks (without jackets) were £4, with jackets £6 or £8, depending on condition and a number of other factors including age and original cost. Antiquarian books were, and remain, a more complex area with even more variables. Maps and illustrations tend to add value, and anyone new to secondhand bookselling quickly learns which illustrators to look out for; Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kate Greenaway, Wily Pogany, Jessie M King, Annie French, Aubrey Beardsley, Kay Nielsen and others from the Golden Age of Illustration are all still enthusiastically collected by those with an interest in such things, although with a global marketplace, values have (generally) dropped due to increased availability and competition.
I was 31 when I bought the shop in 2001. Fifteen years prior to that, a friend and I had been walking through Wigtown and spotted the newly opened bookshop. Neither of us believed that it would survive for longer than a year, but thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of John Carter, the previous owner, it not only survived – it thrived. John filled one room of the rambling Georgian townhouse with books and such was its success that he rapidly expanded, filling the six rooms on the ground floor, and the two rooms of an outbuilding with nearly 100,000 titles. During the Christmas of 2000 when I visited the shop during a trip home from Bristol (where I was working in gas pipeline construction) to see my parents, he told me that he was retiring and intended to sell the shop. At the same time I was lamenting the fact that I really didn’t enjoy my job, so he suggested that I buy the shop from him. When I told him that I didn’t have any money, he replied ‘You don’t need money. What do you think banks are for?’ He was right. After an hour in conversation with the local bank manager, he’d agreed to lend me the money, and at that point I made what has turned out to be undoubtedly the best decision of my life.
Back then many of my customers were other book dealers or ‘runners’ who would travel the country looking for books to fill the shelves of specialist dealers; poetry, military history, first edition fiction – that sort of thing, but nowadays I rarely see another dealer, and I haven’t seen a runner since Amazon started selling second-hand books. The trade has changed almost beyond recognition. The standard discount to other dealers was 10 per cent. Now everybody expects at least that. Not easy when you’re running a struggling small business with very tight margins. The notable exceptions to this are – despite our reputation for meanness – the Scots, and American customers who rarely expect discounts.
My stock, like most secondhand booksellers, comes mostly from people who are downsizing, or clearing deceased estates. You encounter a lot of death in the second-hand book business. Last week I was at the house of a widow in Dalbeattie who was selling her late husband’s library
– a fascinating collection of books about the Middle East, the Indian Rebellion, and steam railway history. This is the most interesting part of being a bookseller – you never know what you’re going to find. Over the years I’ve handled over a million books. I’ve probably only bought 30 per cent of them,
but even the books I reject and leave behind in people’s houses leave an imprint. John, from whom I bought the shop, once told me that ‘After 30 years of bookselling, I can talk for five minutes on any subject. But just five minutes.’ Again, he was right. It’s almost like learning by osmosis. You somehow absorb a little information every day across a huge range of subjects. Customers too, although often my bêtes noire are a mine of information. Admittedly, most of it I don’t care to hear (‘My grandfather is mentioned on page 246 of A History of Carriage Clocks in Gloucestershire’ is typical. I don’t care). I once sold a set of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland to a customer who, post-transaction, told me that his interest in it wasn’t for the beautiful copperplate illustrations, or the fine calf binding, but because it was the first book to contain the text of Tam o’shanter, which Grose had commissioned Burns to write after dining with him near Dumfries. Had it not been for that chance meeting, Scottish literature might have been denied one the finest poems Burns ever wrote, and had it not been for that customer, I probably would never have known that, nor the fact that the bard’s first effort was rejected by Grose, who wanted something ‘more supernatural’.
The world has changed a great deal in the past two decades, and the number of independent bookshops has haemorrhaged during that time. Adapt and survive seems to be the mantra trotted out by business advisors; open a cafe in your bookshop. But I don’t want to adapt. I don’t want to run a cafe. I want to run a bookshop, and thankfully it appears that an increasing number of people are aware of the ravages that Amazon has inflicted on our industry, and are returning to bookshops in sufficient numbers to (hopefully) ensure our survival. The cultural importance of having bookshops on the high street cannot be underestimated.