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A review by mcmillan
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
5.0
I'm sure nearly every bookish person has daydreamed of owning a bookshop at one time or another, and this is a very funny and cynical account of that process. Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop, located in the south-western town of Wigtown. This is a journal he kept throughout 2014, and it details the day-to-day interactions and struggles that come up in the store.
Shaun Bythell is hilarious. He mentions he's been compared to Bernard Black from Black Books, and you can really see why. You can feel the slight disdain for customers bubbling under (and often over) the surface in each journal entry, but he very obviously loves the life as well. He is deeply annoyed by ridiculous customers, the sort of customers that seem completely exaggerated unless you've worked in customer service and have seen how people can act, but he also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in their quirky behaviour and bizarre requests. He only truly rages against Amazon in this, which is fair enough.
I could see some people finding this a bit dull, but I loved it. I loved the mundane details of owning and stocking the shop, and I loved his descriptions on his customers and staff. He can be ruthless in these descriptions, which apparently garnered him quite a following on Facebook. I thought I had bookmarked a few passages in the audiobook to quote here, but they didn't seem to take, which is a shame. Scottish Review of Books has a few entries available to read, although they don't include any of my favourite bits.
I will make an effort to visit The Bookshop next time I find myself in Scotland. Here's hoping I won't do something silly enough to be mentioned on his Facebook page. Interestingly, he's actually opened a vacation rental in Wigtown called The Open Book, where you rent out the home above another bookshop and run it while you're there, to give people a taste of owning their own shop. It's a neat idea, although I'm not actually sure whether I'd want to spend my holiday doing that, even if a lot of my holiday time does usually end up in bookshops.
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Shaun Bythell is hilarious. He mentions he's been compared to Bernard Black from Black Books, and you can really see why. You can feel the slight disdain for customers bubbling under (and often over) the surface in each journal entry, but he very obviously loves the life as well. He is deeply annoyed by ridiculous customers, the sort of customers that seem completely exaggerated unless you've worked in customer service and have seen how people can act, but he also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in their quirky behaviour and bizarre requests. He only truly rages against Amazon in this, which is fair enough.
I could see some people finding this a bit dull, but I loved it. I loved the mundane details of owning and stocking the shop, and I loved his descriptions on his customers and staff. He can be ruthless in these descriptions, which apparently garnered him quite a following on Facebook. I thought I had bookmarked a few passages in the audiobook to quote here, but they didn't seem to take, which is a shame. Scottish Review of Books has a few entries available to read, although they don't include any of my favourite bits.
I will make an effort to visit The Bookshop next time I find myself in Scotland. Here's hoping I won't do something silly enough to be mentioned on his Facebook page. Interestingly, he's actually opened a vacation rental in Wigtown called The Open Book, where you rent out the home above another bookshop and run it while you're there, to give people a taste of owning their own shop. It's a neat idea, although I'm not actually sure whether I'd want to spend my holiday doing that, even if a lot of my holiday time does usually end up in bookshops.
Book Blog | Twitter | Instagram