The bookseller’s report card

There is little that a seller of second-hand books does not know

January 14, 2018 12:15 am | Updated January 20, 2018 10:43 am IST

Some books should come with a warning, pictorial or not, and Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller is one of them. For one, even a few pages into this Bridget Jones-for-bibliophiles diary, and you know you’ll be gnawed by the fear of being watched and profiled the next time you enter a bookshop. Bythell, the youngish owner of the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland called The Bookshop, reportedly created quite a stir some years ago when he decided to focus on customer behaviour on the shop’s Facebook page — the more acerbic the post, the greater the response he got. Not that the gentle reader of this witty, affectionate book should worry about experiencing too many shocks of recognition, but by the time Bythell is done telling the story of a long year in bookselling, she will likely experience pangs of guilt when next reaching for her Kindle to instantaneously download a book, or comparison-shopping for the best price on its deadwood edition. Or even splurging on merchandise.

Danger of recognition

Bythell prefaces each month’s entries with a quote from George Orwell’s essay “Bookshop Memories”, based on his stint as an assistant in a bookshop in London’s Hampstead in the 1930s. For instance, the March 2014 chapter begins with this quote: “When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you do not work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.” How right, chimes in Bythell, chuckling at the vast numbers of readers who’d nonetheless consider themselves “bookish”. They are easy to recognise, he writes, they’ll announce their love of books, “they’ll wear T-shirts or carry bags with slogans explaining exactly how much they think they adore books, but the surest means of identifying them is that they’ll never, ever buy books.”

Or there are ones who stroll into a bookshop to show off, or possibly to affirm to themselves that they know a literary thing or two. One February day, a man asks for books by Nigel Tranter, and upon being pointed to the “Scottish room”, he soon enough quietly leaves the shop. Says Bythell: “Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are and have no intention of buying anything.”

Or, as Orwell observed all those decades ago, “There are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops…” These days, writes Bythell, it’s not so much that people are borderline lunatics, but they treat bookshops as waiting areas.

Uniquely placed

Bythell perhaps has a better handle reading his customers, given his trade in second-hand books. His trade involves buying up collections. Upon being called by prospect sellers, it’s all in a day’s work to size up a personal library built up over the years to see what condition the books are in, whether they’ll interest the general or the specialised reader, how valuable a signed or a first edition may be. Books by Terry Pratchett, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse will always sell, but so do second-hand books on the railways.

He also has a better understanding of publishing history than, say, a retailer of new titles. To share his thoughts is to better appreciate — in this time of giant retailers (primarily Amazon), algorithmic recommendations and download/print on demand options — the role played by runners. It is to be in proximity of publications by publishers who have long closed shop. And most of all it is to understand yet better how the Amazon-driven retail model of finding the lowest possible price on every book is devastating the ecosystem, so that there is a “squeeze not only on independent bookshops but also on publishers, authors and, ultimately, creativity.”

Bythell creates his own celebration of the bookish world, keeping a “festival bed” for select folks to camp in overnight, as a homage to Paris’s Shakespeare and Company. He runs a Random Book Club — sign up and you receive in the mail a book chosen by him. He lets out his living room for art sessions. And he creates a community of the readerly. There are his eccentric assistants. There is Mr. Deacon who’ll come in to order books, showing not the least initiative to find them online, and always patient and polite. For example: “As I came down the stairs with two cups of tea at 11 a.m. I literally bumped into Mr. Deacon, covering his shirt with hot tea. He didn’t seem to mind in the slightest and pointed out several other stains he had inflicted on his shirt while having his breakfast this morning. He asked if we could order him a copy of Kate Whitaker’s A Royal Passion .” Bythell will honour Mr. Deacon’s quiet dignity till he himself shares his heartbreaking news. And while he’s unyielding to rude demands for a discount, he’ll refuse to charge a customer who finds a book that belonged to his father on the shelves.

All told, he forces you to ask, what do they know of books who only books read?

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