The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
So you think you’d like to run a bookshop? Here’s a book to tempt and deter you in equal measure. In 2001 Shaun Bythell acquired The Bookshop, the flagship bookstore in Wigtown, the Book Town in Galloway in the southwest of Scotland. Here he gives a one-year snapshot of life at the shop, from February 2014 to February 2015. At the start you can feel the winter chill in the old granite building, and as months pass you sense mounting excitement at preparations for the annual Book Festival (going on now) and the Scottish referendum. It’s a pleasure to spend a vicarious year at the shop. This would make a great bedside book for a bookish type to parcel out 5–10 pages at a time (another Christmas gift idea?).
Bythell frequently ventures out to buy book collections in auctions and from estates, and occasionally goes fishing with his father or friends. But mostly we see what daily life is like for a bookshop owner. He can’t afford full-time staff, so gets sporadic help from university-age gals; his most “reliable” part-timer is Nicky, a ski suit-wearing, Dumpster-diving Jehovah’s Witness who blithely ignores much of what he asks her to do.
Every entry opens and closes with statistics on the day’s takings and online orders. Profits range from £5 to £500 a day, rising in the summer and peaking around £1200 during the festival. Also listed is the number of customers who make purchases, which represents only one-fifth of daily footfall. Nowadays most bookstores sell online too, and The Bookshop reluctantly partners with Amazon as a marketplace seller. There’s also ABE and eBay; as a last-ditch option, some outfits take books in bulk, even if just to recycle them. Alongside online sales, it’s essential for bookstores to have sidelines. Bythell does video production and sells furniture, antiques and walking sticks carved by “Sandy, the tattooed pagan.”
As with Wendy Welch’s The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, I enjoyed the nitty-gritty details about acquiring and pricing books, especially the serendipitous moments of coming across real treasures, like a book signed by Sir Walter Scott and a 1679 edition of the Decameron with an interesting provenance. The book is also full of quirky customer behavior, the kind of stuff that fills The Bookshop’s Facebook feed. Bythell cultivates a curmudgeonly persona – he once shot a broken Kindle and mounted it on the bookshop wall – and maintains a tone that’s somewhere between George Orwell (excerpts from whose “Bookshop Memories” serve as monthly epigraphs) and Jen Campbell (Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops et al.). Here’s a few of the best encounters:
a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he’d borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.
A man smelling of TCP [antiseptic] was the only customer in the shop for the first hour of opening, during which time I attempted to put out fresh stock. He had an uncanny ability to be standing in front of every shelf to which I needed access, regardless of the subject or where in the shop the relevant shelves were.
While I was repairing a broken shelf in the crime section, I overheard an elderly customer confusing E. L. James and M. R. James while discussing horror fiction with her friend. She is either going to be pleasantly surprised or deeply shocked when she gets home with the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey she bought.
I’ve been to Hay-on-Wye six times now but haven’t made it to Wigtown yet. It’s high on my bookish wish list. I had two additional reasons for wanting to read this particular book: I’d read Three Things You Need to Know about Rockets, a memoir by Bythell’s former partner, the American Jessica Fox (here known as “Anna”; in her book he’s “Ewan”), about coming to Scotland on a whim and falling in love with a bookshop owner; and I’m awfully fond of The Bookshop Band, a folky husband–wife musical duo who this year relocated from Bath to Wigtown. It was such fun to read about their first time playing in Wigtown and their stay as the inaugural guests/temporary store managers via The Open Book Airbnb project.

Colin Kinnear [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Book Shop trivia:
- December is by far the quietest month. (“The few people who give second-hand books as gifts for Christmas are usually eccentric” – count me as one of them!)
- Railway books sell best.
- Terry Pratchett, John Buchan, P.G. Wodehouse and E.F. Benson books are also perennial best sellers.
- You’ll be amazed at how many customers try to haggle over prices. It’s a shop, not a rummage sale, for goodness’ sake! I can’t imagine ever having the cheek to offer less than the advertised price.
My rating:
The Diary of a Bookseller was released in the UK on September 28th. My thanks to Profile Books for the free review copy.
Music to Read and Write By
I usually can’t read while music is playing; the exception is if we’re on a long car journey – my husband needs to have peppy music playing to keep alert while he’s driving, so I have to find a Kindle book or two that I can zone out with. In day-to-day life, though, I tend to read in silence. If I find myself a little dozy and want to stay awake to get more pages read or edited, my music choices tend to be wordless: a classical compilation, or some instrumental folk. However, here’s another exception: I can read and work very well to Sigur Rós, an Icelandic indie/post-rock group who sing in Icelandic and/or Hopelandic, their invented language. For some reason Jónsi’s ethereal falsetto just washes over me and I can turn off the part of my brain that tries desperately to make English sense out of the words.
Writing is another matter. Unless I urgently need to concentrate – for instance, if I’m writing my first article for a new venue and feeling daunted and inadequate (cough, LARB, cough) – I almost always have music playing. I often turn to albums I know very well: they provide good cheer but aren’t distracting, so make for good background music. My most played tracks of all are from three playlists I made for my sister around the time of her husband’s death. I chose songs that would be meaningful and even uplifting without being in any way sappy. Examples: “The Drugs Don’t Work” (The Verve), “The Heart of Life” (John Mayer), “P.S. You Rock My World” (Eels) and “All Possibilities” (Badly Drawn Boy).
I recently discovered the play count feature on Windows Media Player and had great fun going through and seeing which individual songs and whole albums I’d played the most in the couple of years I’ve used my secondhand laptop. In some cases I was surprised, but most of these artists I could have predicted:
My 17 Most Played Albums:
Fading West, Switchfoot (32 plays)
Flat Earth Diary, Krista Detor (30 plays)
Memory Man, Aqualung (30 plays)
The Take-off and Landing of Everything, Elbow (25 plays)
You Knows It, Folk On (25 plays)
One Wild Life: Soul, Gungor (25 plays)
Barely, Krista Detor (24 plays)
Collapsible Lung, Relient K (24 plays)
Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens (23 plays)
Sparks, Imogen Heap (20 plays)
Havoc and Bright Lights, Alanis Morissette (17 plays)
Chocolate Paper Suites, Krista Detor (16 plays)
With Love, Rosie Thomas (16 plays)
Ghost Stories, Coldplay (15 plays)
Born and Raised, John Mayer (15 plays)
The Impersonator, Marc Martel (15 plays)
This Earthly Spell, Karine Polwart (15 plays)
Of course, this mostly just tells you my listening tastes. But I’d like to think these artists hit a good balance of upbeat and mellow, catchy and contemplative. Or just plain daft, in the case of comedy folk trio Folk On. If I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, my inclination might be to play albums that defined the late 1990s or early 2000s for me, from artists like Matchbox 20, Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Sting and The Verve. (Not represented on this list, but I feel like I play them all the time: Bell X1, The Bookshop Band, Duke Special, and The Shins.)
Can you read or write to music? What are some of your favorite albums to work by?
We’re moving on Monday and may be without home Internet access for a week, so I’ll be scheduling a few posts ahead in case I can’t devote much time to blogging.
A Book-Themed Concert and Goody Bag
On Saturday my husband and I headed to Hungerford to see The Bookshop Band for the second time. A year and a half ago I first had the chance to see them live at the 2014 Hungerford Literary Festival, when they gave a performance tied in with Rachel Joyce’s release of The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.
The band formed about five years ago to provide music for author events at their local bookshop, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England. Since then they’ve written somewhere between 120 and 150 songs inspired by books. Their basic genre is indie folk, with plenty of guitar, ukulele and cello as well as a bunch of improvised percussion and three intermingled voices. Depending on the book in question, though, the feel can vary widely, ranging from sweet to bizarre or haunting. Especially when I’ve read the book being sung about, it’s intriguing to see what the musicians have picked up on – often something very different from what I would as a reader and reviewer.
This year the band (now down to two members) is making an effort to record and release all their songs in 10 albums. I participated in a crowdfunding project so am lucky enough to receive all their new releases in digital format before they’re available as printed CDs. The first album is Curious and Curiouser, the title track of which was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Other sets of songs are based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the steampunk novel The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, while “Once Upon a Time,” a commission for radio, strings together famous first lines from fiction.
My favorite Bookshop Band song (so far) is “Bobo and the Cattle,” inspired by Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Two great ones new to me from Saturday’s performance were “Faith in Weather,” based on Central European fairy tales, and “You Make the Best Plans, Thomas,” about Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.
You can listen to lots of their songs on their Bandcamp page and dozens of videos of their performances are on YouTube and Vimeo (I’ve linked to several above). When performing events they often get the authors to play with them: Louis de Bernières pitched in with mandolin on a song about The Dust that Falls from Dreams, and Yann Martel played glockenspiel while promoting The High Mountains of Portugal.
We had started off the day with lunch at a Berkshire country pub, The Pot Kiln, where we didn’t mind the 40-minute wait for food because we had books and half-pints of beer and cider to while away the time over as sunshine poured through the windows. The menu is mostly based around game shot by the chef himself in the fields opposite the pub, so we indulged in a venison and wild boar hot dog and venison Scotch eggs before setting off on a windy several-mile walk near Combe Gibbet and then continuing on to Hungerford.
Now for the goody bag: on the venue tables the owner of Hungerford Bookshop had placed a ten-question literary quiz to work on and hand in during the intermission. I was fairly confident on some of my answers, had a guess at the others, and after literally about 45 minutes of wrestling with anagrams finally figured out that “Lobbing Slates” gives the name of novelist Stella Gibbons. We won with 7 out of 10 correct; an elderly lady joked that we’d Googled all the answers, but I pointed out that we don’t own a smartphone between us! Now, I suspect we were actually the only entry, but that doesn’t diminish our accomplishment, right?! I was delighted to win a couple of free books I hadn’t necessarily intended on reading but now certainly will, plus a metal bookmark and a notebook, all in a limited-edition “Books Are My Bag” tote designed by Tracey Emin.
All in all, a fantastic and mostly bookish day out!
If you live in the UK and get the chance, don’t hesitate to go see The Bookshop Band play; they’re touring widely this year.