Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 11

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Opened the curtains this morning to see the first sign of the sun in what feels like months.

I spent the first hour of the working day being slowly asphyxiated by a customer’s perfume, which I can only assume was manufactured as a particularly unpleasant neurotoxin by a North Korean biochemist in a secret bunker. Kim Jong extremely ill.

Another order came in for a book from the Railway Room. These are always the hardest to find. Railway enthusiasts must not care much for order on their bookshelves.

A woman slightly older than me, I’d guess, came in around 11 a.m. I vaguely recognised her, so when she came to pay for a pile of novels—all of which I’d read and enjoyed—I asked her why she seemed familiar. It turns out that she used to go to the same auction house in Dumfries that I occasionally attend, so we reminisced about all the various characters and questionable activity that inevitably seem to surround auctions. It then emerged that she has a tea room in Rockcliffe (about 35 miles away), so we moaned about customers, and particularly about running a business on your own, and one that people expect to be open when it suits them rather than when it suits you. We have a shared loathing of the tyranny of social obligation in rural communities. She hates having anything planned as much as I do, it appears. And she’s just finished reading Any Human Heart, one of my favourite books.

I started sorting through the two remaining boxes from the deal before Christmas. Not good shop stock, but all barcoded and in pristine condition—perfect for FBA,^† so I processed them and boxed them up ready for ‘uplift.’ Some surprisingly high prices for paperbacks, but that’s the way things have gone since online selling—it is harder to predict the value of a book than it once was.

In the afternoon I had a massive row with a customer over whether Maigret was a fictional French detective (me) or a Belgian surrealist painter (them), after which I telephoned the woman in Ayr whose books I’m supposed to be looking at tomorrow to postpone. She sounded enormously relieved and clearly has yet to go through them and sort the books she wants to keep from those she wants to dispose of.

Till Total £65.49

3 Customers