I’ve recently been in a mood for books about bookstores and libraries, and so discovered a series by Shaun Bythell, owner of Scotland’s largest secondhand book shop. Most of Bythell’s books are diaries of his day-to-day activities, with one of exception. I’ve been slowly poking through Remainders of the Day for the last few weeks, and finished it today along with a shorter volume that is also the outlier in Bythell’s works.

The format of Remainders of the Day is a diary, and appears based on a literal diary Bythell keeps on his computer — monitoring the number of online orders received, the amount of till intake and customer – – which is sometimes altered by his assistants with amusing results. The volume takes us through a year (early 2016 – early 2017) in the life of a Scottish bookseller in Wigtown, a municipality in Scotland known for its book trade and annual literary fairs. (It’s so known that it has an airbnb called The Open Book in which guests pay for the privilege of …running the bookstore.)  This presents multiple avenues of interest: first, there’s the inherent attraction of experiencing (vicariously) a year in the life of a Scottish village centered on books, with the full array of eccentric characters that bookshops attract — like Sandy the Tatooed Pagan, who is described thusly every single time he comes into the shop. Bythell’s stories range from commenting on community goings-on, like the plight of one of his friends struggling with mental issues, to recording the antics of bizaare and sometimes awful customers. Bythell straddles an odd place: he’s a community fixture who helps organize the literary festival and is an integral part of Wigtown’s economy, but he’s also a bookseller on the global market, and frequently has to ship to Germany and even the United States. The only secondhand shop I’m intimately familiar with (Selma’s Broad Street Books) is more of a watering hole for the town’s bookish sorts and less a commercial venture, so getting a look at the business end through Bythell’s eyes was interesting. He encounters so many frustrations with Amazon, for instance, that he more or less gives up on trying to sell there. The shop varies widely in activity from day to day, sometimes only taking in £20 or so, but once taking in nearly £700 during the festival. Bythell stays very busy and despite his age has the schedule of a college student — often not going to bed until well after midnight, sometimes in the middle of the night, but invariably opening the shop by nine am or so. His shop has a large selection of obscure and rare books — first editions, complete series known for their superior binding, that sort of thing — as well as the airport fiction tourists are prone to pick up. I was frequently surprised by how obscure his collection could be, and how obsessive collectors were: there were people in Germany and the United States ordering books about Scottish birds, for instance, and so many mentions to people buying railroad maps and books on particular train engines and the like I that I lost count. I knew trainspotting was more common in Britain than the United States, but being confronted with such aggressive interest was surprising. All told, I enjoyed the book but had to take it slowly, and will probably delay reading the other book(s?) in the series until it feels fresh again.

The Seven Kind of People You Find in Bookshops, though pulling from the same well of experience, is an altogether different approach: instead of monitoring a year in the bookshore, Bythell focuses on the customer angle and divides visitors to the bookshop into seven broad categories, with an eighth extra one commenting on the bookshop staff. It’s more or less just commentary on different types of people attracted to the shop — SF fans, conspiracy theorists and occultists, pedants obsessed with one particular subject like rail gauges of Cornwall or waxwings of Yorkshire, annoying whistlers, parents who mistake the bookstore staff for babysitters, etc.  Librarians also get mistaken for babysitters, so I sympathized. Amusing collection on the whole: I was glad to see that SF fans cut a good figure. Interesting, Bythell comments that most of his trade in genealogical books is to American tourists, who seem obsessed by it. 

Coming up…I’ve been (and remain) wretchedly sick this week from some respiratory thing that’s not COVID, strep, or flu, so I’ve done very little reading until today. Mostly I’ve been trying to listen to audiobooks between naps and coughing jags. Blew through five days of leave time, so there go my plans for going out west this year. I have two SF books that I’m puttering through, as well as a history of Saturday Night Live that I may or may not finish: I was only interested in the first five seasons, but that’s barely a third of the book.