‘The Diary of a Bookseller’
A year in the life of a Scottish used bookstore
I cannot shake the idea that I should start my own bookstore. Maybe it is a madness brought on by advancing age, or perhaps it is rooted in my coastal South Carolina town just outside Charleston having only a Barnes & Noble — a Barnes & Noble that had not books but wool socks in its most prominent spot inside the door.
(I find wool socks a nice accouterment on a cozy reading day, but I prefer my bookstores to feature, you know, books.)
When my simmering desire to own a bookstore flares, I shall return to “The Diary of a Bookseller” by Shaun Bythell, which makes owning a bookstore seem simultaneously the most terrible and most wonderful thing one could do.
Bythell took over The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, in 2001, just after his 31st birthday and has kept it going ever since. The book covers a single year (2014) of Bythell’s life running “the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland,” with more than 100,000 books shelved and 100 additional titles arriving each day.
The daily entries introduce us to a series of eccentrics, including part-time shop employee Nicky, who brings special treats scavenged from the trash behind the supermarket every Friday. During the winter months, Nicky wears a padded ski suit to stave off the cold inside the store that makes her look like a “lost Teletubby.” The eccentrics include customers and others who summon Bythell to assess large collections of books they’re trying to divest, often because of a death.
Apparently railroad books are a consistent seller. How would I have ever known this if not for Bythell’s diary?
Bythell is something of a character himself, acquiring the bookstore on a half whim from its retiring previous owner because Bythell could not find a job that seemed to promise satisfaction.
“The customer is always right” has little currency with Bythell, who writes with biting humor about some of the shenanigans people try to pull as they bargain over items already deeply discounted. When a woman leaves a book behind in a huff, complaining about a price of 4 pounds 50, Bythell ups the price to 8.50 and returns it to the shelf, believing she’ll be back.
He was right. She bought the book at the higher price. I chuckled to myself for a good minute after reading the denouement to that little tale. I can laugh all over again just thinking about it.
Like most diaries, the book isn’t heavy on plot; threads of story appear and resolve. A favorite customer is in apparent cognitive decline. Nicky and Bythell battle over different visions over the store. New Amazon policies squeeze the store’s margins ever tighter. Each entry is headed with the number of books ordered online and how many were successfully located in the store’s warren of titles. The entries end with the customers and total sales, often less than 200 pounds a day.
Bythell’s life is envious in way, owning a shop in a small Scottish town, free time spent biking and fishing, drinking and eating with close friends. The store is central, but it is an organizing principle, rather than an obsession. Certain things need doing to keep the store going, and so he does them.
Bythell is a man on a mission, and a year seen through his eyes convinces the reader that it is a mission worthy of undertaking.
For someone else, though. I do not have what it takes, but all blessings to those who do. Books of landscape and adventure cluster here. If others haven’t read “Young Men and Fire,” it is a knockout true story and deserves to be held in equal esteem with Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” I think Tonia will enjoy Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains,” part history, part memoir, part lots of other things.
1. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick
2. “Morning Star” by Pierce Brown
3. “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead
4. “Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father” by Peter Stark
5. “Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward
— Ryan O., Chicago One of my favorites of recent time: “The Privileges” by Jonathan Dee. I love the way this novel defies expectation while being firmly grounded in the world we know.