The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

My daughter gave me The Diary of A Bookseller by Shawn Bythell for my birthday. I’d first heard about it in some sort of media report about Wigtown, Scotland and it’s annual book festival. It’s a yearlong diary Bythell kept to share his life as owner of a large used bookstore in a small rural town.

I’ve worked in an indie bookstore and I felt fairly well aware of the threat Amazon has been to booksellers but I was thinking from the perspective of stores that primarily sell new books. I didn’t fully grasp the way Amazon has undermined the value of used books and made it harder and less profitable to run a used bookshop.

I used to fantasize about having a used bookstore and even had a book (which I think I bought at Powell’s) about how to do start and run one, right down to how to build the shelves. I let the book go a few years ago when we were having a big clear out (to make way for more books) and realized then that the business had likely changed so much I’d be better off learning from someone in the trade today.  The Diary of a Bookseller drove that point home for sure.

Some of what Bythell described is recognizable to anyone who has worked retail or in a library — the regulars who are both very familiar and complete strangers, the rude or demanding or opinionated people who feel entitled to provide commentary on the way things are run, the stock, the prices, the staff, etc. Other challenges I hadn’t considered, like the wear and tear on the body of lugging boxes of books, the difficulty of heating a very old building, and the fearful difficulty of clearing a clogged gutter in a downpour to stop it flooding the shop.

I admire Bythell’s desire to be independent, to quietly fight on against giants like Amazon and Waterstones, and to find hope in kind customers and in the beauty of living where one wants, doing something one values. It’s also really interesting to read the quotes from George Orwell’s Bookshop Memories at the start of each chapter and realize that as different as the world was in the first half of the 20th century when Orwell worked in a bookshop, many things he wrote about are still true today.

This was an interesting and enjoyable read, and I hope to make it to Wigtown and The Bookshop one day! I also hope the Random Book Club re-opens for membership. In less than a year I’ll be done with my second foray into grad school and free to read whatever I want, so that would be a good gift to myself!

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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald‘s The Bookshop is one of the books I bought at the Five Colleges Book Sale, and I read it yesterday afternoon while waiting to hear what you all suggest I read next (so far the consensus is The Scapegoat, as soon as it arrives). In keeping with how she appears to have been treated in her lifetime, as this appreciation by Julian Barnes suggests, I purchased two of Fitzgerald’s books accidentally, because I was thinking of Penelope Lively. As I told the Computer Scientist, it all worked out, because somehow, I’ve never read Fitzgerald and she’s marvelous.

The Bookshop is a brief but brilliant tribute to the difficulty of being “not from around here.” The heroine, Florence Green, decides to open a bookshop in a very small town on the coast of England in 1959. She’s a widow, and as the book opens “she had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” Having worked in a large book store in London, she decides that she’ll buy the derelict and aptly named Old House, damp and reportedly haunted by a “rapper” — a loud sort of poltergeist — and transform it into a bookshop.

In the course of 123 pages, Florence struggles to do so, encountering helpful Boy Scouts, a capable ten year old whose large family sends her to be a shop assistant, unhelpful and patronizing bankers and lawyers, and an assortment of customers. She also manages to meet and annoy the formidable Mrs. Gamart, who fancies herself a patron of the arts and has designs on the Old House, and Mr. Brundish, an elderly “descendent of one of the most ancient Suffolk families,” who becomes a friend of sorts, if an eccentric one in failing health. A young BBC employee, Milo, also seems to befriend Florence and the shop, although Florence can’t seem to get a read on him. All these characters and many minor ones march off the pages of this book, fully dimensional.

Florence fumbles her way, taking a big gamble on a new book, Lolita, and trying not to embarrass herself when her accountant comes around. Will she overcome her struggles and make a go of it? How will the town ultimately treat their outsider bookseller? What will become of her various friends, young and old? If you have a spare evening, you’ll soon learn. Fitzgerald writes in a way that portrays each scene vividly but with minimal words. For example, when General Gamart visits the bookshop to buy a war memoir, “He glanced about him as if on parole, and retreated with his parcel.” Fitzgerald succinctly shows us his discomfort. And to be clear, I shared that discomfort, by the end of this story, as Fitzgerald captures the pettiness of small towns everywhere. Still, I felt a ray of hope.

The other Fitzgerald I bought is apparently one of Barnes’ favorites, The Blue Flower. I look forward to it, and to deliberately hunting down more of her books at the next sale I attend.

 

 

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