Scottish bookseller is back, logging shop life

A good book about books is “Confessions of a Bookseller” by Shaun Bythell (David R. Godine, 323 pp., $25.95).

Bythell’s Wigtown townhouse, the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland, boasts 100,000 volumes maintained across a full mile of shelving — presided over by an adipose but energetic cat named Captain. Rank rules, reports Bythell.

In 2017 I wrote about a previous book by Bythell, “Diary of a Bookseller.” Readers begged for more, and he obliged with a follow-up book, this one, same format but documenting a new year. Some of his favorite quirky characters and themes populate both books.

“Once you’ve been around rare books for awhile,” Bythell writes, “you become acutely aware of people mishandling them.

“The pleasure derived from handling books that have introduced something of cultural or scientific significance to the world is undeniably the greatest luxury that this business affords, and few other walks of life — if any — provide such a wealth of opportunity to indulge in this. This is why, every morning, getting out of bed is not in anticipation of a repetitive drudge but in expectation that I may have the chance to hold in my hands a copy of something that first brought to humanity an idea that changed the course of history, whether it be a 1791 copy of The Rights of Man or the 1887 English translation of Das Kapital, or an early edition of Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This is what it’s all about.”

It’s less a game than an intellectual adventure. Phooey — it’s a game.

But it certainly is not dull. “Confessions of a Bookseller” is a journal of how Bythell spent each day for a full year in his bookshop. He includes statistics of how many customers came in each day, how much the till was, how many online orders he got and if those books were found.

He also gives us peeks into his not-so-private opinions when customers bring in books to sell. They consistently tell him “they want the books to ‘go to a good home,’ as if they were a much loved pet or a family heirloom.” (He has no idea where they’ll end up and clearly doesn’t much care.) He institutes a blackboard on which he and his staff write daily amusements, such as:

You just walked past a bookstore. Is there something wrong with you?

Or, on another day:

Boxing day is here.

Run away to a bookshop:

Escape the fake cheer.

Bythell: “As I walked from the van to the shop, the geese were flying over Wigtown to overnight on the salt marsh at the foot of the hill on which the town sits. It’s a sight and a sound that never fails to impress, as thousands of them form an almost perfect V-formation as they fly in the thickening darkness in the cold, damp midwinter.”

It strikes a chord.

Facts and fictions. Grad schools and military service. They all brought me back to books. We traveled in time. Many of us have been through the same drill. Books opened doors. And shut some. But they all sought to make the mad world interpretable.

Word has it a Shaun Bythell TV series is in the works, to be titled “Diary of a Bookseller.”

Stay tuned. It should be one ring-tailed, well-researched journey to watch.