Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 10

Online orders: 3

Orders found: 3

All three orders today were for books about railways.

Yet another utterly foul day, though the rain abated in the afternoon. The winter so far seems to have been nothing but heavy rain, driven by strong winds. I don’t think we’ve had a single frost.

In today’s inbox:

From: xxxxxxxxxxxx

Subject: the world needs my book

Message Body:

id love to advertise my book with u.

I have written a book that ensures the person you find becomes your life partner, this also removes the need for lying, manipulation and game playing. prevents emotional damage and removes the risk to human life through suicide.by arming people with knowledge about personalities.

The first customer of the day was an elderly woman who wanted to use the shop’s telephone to call her daughter-in-law, who had failed to pick her up from the doctor’s. The second customer was a balding man with a ponytail who tutted at the price of every single book he picked up.

I found an old blackboard in the cellar and made a frame for it out of an old picture frame. It looks rather nice. I’ve decided to try to write something amusing on it every day, an endeavour that is doomed to failure as weeks—sometimes months—may pass before a witty thought enters my head. To make it simpler, I picked a quotation from Noël Coward, taken from a book called Famous Last Words: ‘Goodnight my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

My mother dropped round at about 4 p.m. and talked without interruption for half an hour. Topics covered were the Writers’ House idea and a source of potential funding that she’s found (she repeated this at least six times), her friends’ friends who have a castle in Deeside which is about to fall into the river because of the floods (repeated four times) and the tenants of The Open Book^* who left the place in a bit of a mess (‘despicable’). It wasn’t the most recent occupants, two Spanish women, but another couple (repeated four times).

About twenty minutes after she’d left (with a breezy ‘Must dash, goodbye lovey’) I looked out of the window and saw her bashed-up VW badly parked in the bus stop, while she busily chatted to someone. When I closed the shop half an hour later she was still there, bending the ear of whoever had the good fortune to bump into her.

Till Total £125.49

11 Customers