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A review by enikka
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
5.0
Strangely addictive
It wasn’t as funny as I had assumed, but funny nonetheless. The wonderful anecdotes reflected the specificity of working in an antiquarian bookstore. I have to admit painfully that a few times in the past, I also left a bookstore without buying a book and I promise I will never do it again.
Also, it was great seeing the bookshop from the owner's side with all its rules, problems and the weird thing customer’s sometimes say.
Examples:
At 10 a.m. the first customer came throught the door: 'I'm not really interested in books' followed by 'Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.'
After lunch a teenage girl – who had been sitting by the fire reading for an hour – brought three Agatha Christie paperbacks to the counter; the total came to £8. She offered me a limp fiver and said, ‘Can I have them for £5?’ I refused, telling her that the postage on Amazon alone would come to £7.40. She wandered off muttering about getting them from the library. Good luck with that: Wigtown library is full of computers and DVDs and not a lot of books.
When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down - as if for confirmation of this - then looked back at me and said, 'A dead bird can't fall out of it's nest', and left the shop fly still agape.
To sum up: I hope to visit this extraordinary Scottish antiquarian bookshop in Wigtown someday.
It wasn’t as funny as I had assumed, but funny nonetheless. The wonderful anecdotes reflected the specificity of working in an antiquarian bookstore. I have to admit painfully that a few times in the past, I also left a bookstore without buying a book and I promise I will never do it again.
Also, it was great seeing the bookshop from the owner's side with all its rules, problems and the weird thing customer’s sometimes say.
Examples:
At 10 a.m. the first customer came throught the door: 'I'm not really interested in books' followed by 'Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.'
After lunch a teenage girl – who had been sitting by the fire reading for an hour – brought three Agatha Christie paperbacks to the counter; the total came to £8. She offered me a limp fiver and said, ‘Can I have them for £5?’ I refused, telling her that the postage on Amazon alone would come to £7.40. She wandered off muttering about getting them from the library. Good luck with that: Wigtown library is full of computers and DVDs and not a lot of books.
When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down - as if for confirmation of this - then looked back at me and said, 'A dead bird can't fall out of it's nest', and left the shop fly still agape.
To sum up: I hope to visit this extraordinary Scottish antiquarian bookshop in Wigtown someday.