The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

In 2001, Shaun Bythell returned to Scotland, took a bank loan, and bought a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown. He runs the shop, sources stock, catches trout, and gardens. From the shop, he can hear lambs and frog song. House martins nest in the log store. It’s idyllic - until the customers arrive.

Thirteen years later, one February morning, Bythell started a diary about the workings of a bookshop - and what follows is a year’s worth of daily entries: some a few sentences long, others a page. That there is repetition stands to reason.

Each month is preceded by an excerpt from George Orwell’s essay ‘Bookshop Memories’ (1936) and thoughts by Bythell on bookish topics: gender trends in reading, side-businesses within bookshops, messy children’s sections, and who controls the UK book market.

As much as it is about books, The Diary of a Bookseller is also an account of the rather appalling behaviour of the public. Have we as a nation lost our good-manners? So bleak are Bythell’s customers, that when a small five-year-old boy arrives with £4 to buy his mum a present, I wept for the rare beauty of it.

But Bythell gives as good as he gets:

“… and instead merely reflect rudeness back at people who are rude to me. I can afford to be rude back to customers - it’s my shop, nobody is going to fire me - but most people who work in shops are not in this position, and to exploit that by not showing them the slightest courtesy is something that offends me greatly.” (p.222)

Throughout the diary, Bythell notes the books he reads and recalls favourites: William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, José Saramago’s Blindness, and The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. Among many others.

This is a straightforward, drily humorous diary giving insight but not detail into life in a secondhand bookshop. It’s one for booksellers, book lovers, anyone in shop retail, and the residents of Wigtown. Maybe not all the latter.

But there is a dispiriting lack of real bookworms and book geeks here. Are there no enthusiastic book conversations? No happy nerds? When I worked in a bookshop there was a university professor who would alight weekly to rain illumination on us regarding the portrayal of ravens and crows in literature. Peter, our very own literary magpie.

More Books on Books:

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell: the sequel