Shaun Bythell - Confessions of a Bookseller

Confessions of a
BOOKSELLER

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, and also one of the organisers of the Wigtown Festival. His internationally-bestselling first book, The Diary of a Bookseller has been translated into twenty-three languages, including Russian, Korean, Arabic and French.

Author photograph Ben Please

ALSO BY SHAUN BYTHELL

The Diary of a Bookseller

SHAUN BYTHELL

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Shaun Bythell, 2019

Cover illustration: Bill Bragg

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788162302

eISBN 9781782835394

He handled the books with the reverence of a minister opening the pulpit bible. I had polished the leather that morning till it gleamed like silk, and Mr Pumpherstons finger-tips rested upon it as if they were butterflies alighting on a choice flower. He seemed to purr with pleasure at the contact. The visitor adjusted his spectacles before he turned over the pages and one could see that Mr Pumpherstons delight was infectious.

Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller (Methuen & Co., London, 1942)

When Augustus Muir wrote his spoof diary of John Baxter, I wonder if he was truly aware that this is undoubtedly the best part of the second-hand book trade, and probably of book-collecting too: finding and handling something rare and important. I once had a two-volume set of Francis Groses Antiquities of Scotland, which, to the person who bought it, was the most important book imaginable. Grose and Robert Burns met in 1789 and became friends. Grose asked Burns to write a supernatural tale to accompany an illustration of Auld Alloway Kirk in Antiquities of Scotland, which he was researching at the time, and thus was born perhaps Burnss finest poem, Tam o Shanter. Although it appeared in two other publications first, Groses Antiquities of Scotland was the first book in which the poem appeared, and while it is not of enormous financial worth (the last set I had I sold for 340), it is an important book to devotees of Burns, in part owing to the fact that Burns might well never have written Tam o Shanter had it not been for Groses commission. The customer to whom I sold my copy had travelled down from Ayr when hed heard from one of his friends that we had a copy. It was only after hed paid that he told me of the Robert Burns connection, and had he not, I would probably still be ignorant of the fact to this day. It is an irony of my position that although Im surrounded by books every day most of what I know about them is imparted by customers, the self-same customers whom my first instinct is to discourage from talking.

Muirs description of the way Mr Pumpherston handles the book also resonates: people who deal with rare books regularly visibly handle them differently, making sure to support the boards when opening them so that the hinges dont split, making sure that when the book is removed from the shelf there isnt too much pressure on the headband. Once youve been around rare books for a while, 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, the 1887 English translation of Das Kapital or an early edition of Darwins 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This is what its all about.

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Closed for New Years Day.

After a lie-in, I cycled to my friend Callums for his annual New Year party at lunchtime. Left at about 3 p.m. to get back in daylight, lit the fire in the snug and began reading Miss Lonely-hearts, by Nathanael West, which had been suggested a couple of weeks ago by a customer who had bought several books that I had also read and enjoyed.

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Spent the morning tidying up, then went for a short walk along the beach at Rigg Bay in the wind and rain with Callum and his partner, Petra, just before dusk. Petra is Austrian, with twin girls who are about ten. She always seems in such a ridiculously happy/hippy mood that its almost impossible to imagine how she manages it without the assistance of hallucinogenic drugs, but shes wildly eccentric too, so she fits into the human landscape of Wigtown perfectly. 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. Its 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.

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Back to normal hours, after a week of opening at 10 a.m. rather than the usual 9 a.m. A grey day, but at least the wind and rain have gone. The end of the festive period is always marked by a sharp fall in the number of customers, but today that feeling of emptiness in the shop was ameliorated by the fact that the first customer was Jeff Mead. Jeff is the Church of Scotland minister for the nearby parish of Kirkinner, and his public persona is probably best summed up by my friend Finn, who once told me that Jeff is more comfortable doing funerals than weddings. This, though, belies his true character, which is mischievous, witty and remarkably intelligent, with a formal theological education. Hes close to retirement, and is a large, imposing man. Shortly after Id bought the shop, back in 2001, he came in for a browse. Id bought a life-size skeleton which Id planned to suspend from the ceiling (I have no idea why, but its still there, playing a violin) and which I had temporarily placed sitting in one of the armchairs by the fire, with a copy of Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion in its bony fingers. I heard a howl of laughter from the depths of the shop, and shortly afterwards Jeff appeared and announced, Thats how I want to be found when my time comes.

Telephone call at 11 a.m. from a woman in Ayr. She has books that she wants me to come and look at next week.

On the news this morning was a story about four men who have been abducted from a bookshop in Hong Kong for disseminating literature critical of the Chinese regime. Bookselling can be a perilous business, but mercifully only financially so in Wigtown.