Book review: Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell #LoveYourBookshop #LYBD2020

(cover image courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Happy Love Your Bookshop Day everyone! If you are like me, you love your bookshop every day and the books you get there with immense affection, but today is a day when you can shower love, praise and enduring pleasure upon the good people who put up with a lot to bring you reading joy. My special appreciation goes to Dymocks and Better Read Than Dead, two booksellers without whom my life would be infinitely poorer.

If you love books, I mean really love books (meaning your TBR pile is big enough to build a snug house from to ward off the chill winter winds) then you will likely have dreamed at one time or another of running a bookshop or at the very least, working in one.

Much as the idea of cakeshop ownership seems limitlessly appealing if you have a hankering for cheesecake and cupcakes, the notion of being in a bookshop seems impossibly romantic, the stuff of literary dreams, an imagined idyll where you safe from the savage banality of reality.

Shaun Bythell, who owns the enticingly large 100,000 books strong The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, which hosts the annual Wigtown Book Festival, may be just the person to disabuse you of your rose-tinted glasses notions in his hugely entertaining book, The Diary of a Bookseller.

Released in 2017, it is the diary of a year in the life of the bookshop, 2015 to be precise, in which Bythell details, with warmth, good humour and not a little curmudgeonly affection what life is really like for modern sellers of second-hand books.

Well, what it was like in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, when Amazon was devouring everything in its path, e-books seemed unstoppably triumphant and the idea that anyone would want physical books in a few books seemed quite likely to come true.

“Finally a day without rain. Most of the day was spent packing the books for the Random Book Club and dealing with the Royal Mail’s neolithic mailing system. As the post office in Wigtown is closed on Wednesday afternoon I’ll have to go and see Wilma tomorrow morning and ask her if she can send the postman over in the afternoon to pick up the six sacks of parcels.” (P. 25)

Thankfully, the intervening five years since he wrote his book have proved many of the predictions wrong and I am guessing Bythell, who displays a real love for reading, books and those who value them as highly as he does, would be every bit as delighted as anyone else.

Perhaps, even more so.

For all his amusing griping about rude ill-informed customers and those trying to sell him the “valuable” books in their collection that they believe to be worth a fortune – and let’s face it, these people are absolutely ghastly and you can understand why he is often driven to put them in their place; you would be too if you were in his position – he clearly has a deep and abiding love for books.

Not necessarily for the business of lugging them around and pricing them and keep tracking of titles that gloriously idiosyncratic employees like Nicky insist on misfiling, but for the books themselves.

An avid reader, though not so much be admits since taking over the bookshop in 2001 based on a quick conversation with the shop’s then-owner (it takes a lot of time to run a business like this), he speaks of books with deep love and appreciation, and for all the talk on the book’s dust jacket being a “misanthrope extraordinaire” – not completely true; he has a lot of friends surrounding him in a town he grew up near – his love for the many and varied joys of reading is delightfully palpable.

Shaun Bythell (image courtesy thisNZlife)

This comes through again and again as he recounts how much effort it takes to keep a business like The Bookshop up and running.

It clearly takes money and lots of it, and his accountant is either highfiving his brilliant financial state or warning him darkly about parlous times ahead, and a great deal of commitment to the cause.

Because while a love of books and reading can sustain you through a great deal, it doesn’t help you carry the heavy boxes to and from your car (goodbye healthy back!) nor does it make dealing with any of the argumentative customers any easier, people who think a secondhand book marked at a fraction of its original price is some kind of scurrilous gouging.

For all the negatives, and they can be considerable, though Bythell often treats them with wit, warmth and a muted cantankerous resignation, the great benefit of being in the book business is the chance to meet those people for whom books, and by extension, bookshops, are everything.

Like the young couple he talks about who told him they spend their holidays visiting bookshops all over the UK, or the old man thrilled to have found his dad’s old Latin textbook.

It is these exchanges, with people for whom books are a companion through life, the likes of which they cannot find anywhere else, that infuse The Diary of a Bookseller with sparkling warmth and joy.

“Depressing news today was that last year global revenue from digital downloads of music overtook CD sales. As music, books and films are probably the three media that can most easily and cheaply be digitised, it seems as though it can only be a matter of time before our trade goes the same way, although it is reassuring that large numbers of people who visit the shop tell me that they much prefer the physical pleasure of reading a book …” (PP. 287-288)

They can’t always compensate for the complainants and the ill-considerates who leave books on the floor or false teeth on books or drop a book and break its spine and then leave the store without a word, but the passages where Bythell recounts his happiness at seeing kids reading books or adults ecstatic to have found a long-sought book do make it all worthwhile.

Granted, those exchanges are too few and far between to feast on day in, day out but they are, says Bythell, one of the great perks of the job, a calling which also comes, in Wigtown at least, with the chance to meet authors, drink too whisky while conversing with them and to revel in the fact that, even at the end of an exhausting day of collecting a deceased estate’s worth of books, that being in the literary trade is a very good thing.

Having read The Diary of a Bookseller, and noted how many of the negative trends detailed by Bythell such as a declining love of phsyical books and the closing of many bookshops have now happily reversed, the idea of plunging into 2019’s Confessions of a Bookseller and 2020’s Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops (expected in November) is immensely appealing.

So, while running a bookshop may not be as romantically dreamy as you might have expected – though Wigtown offers aspiring booksellers the chance to see what it would be like by running The Open Book for two weeks – reading vicariously about through the richly-warm, grumpy old man-ish, funny and book-adoring diary entries of Shaun Bythell is a real treat and one you should definitely think of indulging in, along with, especially on Love Your Bookshop Day, going to a bookshop itself and buying books and telling the weary bookseller why you love your purchases so much.

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