Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 18

Online orders: 4

Orders found: 4

Clear, crisp winter’s day, with ice on the pond.

One of today’s orders was for a book called Scottish Castles. I’d bought it originally as a new book and it had remained on the shelf, unsold, for years. The cover price was £35. The supply of new copies must have dried up, so second-hand ones—now more scarce than ever—have shot up in value. The copy we sold today went for £75.

Alicia from The Open Book appeared at 9.30 a.m. and asked to borrow a bike to cycle to Finn’s, so I adjusted one to fit her. It took her an hour and a half to cycle the 8 miles to get there, going into the wind.

Sandy the tattooed pagan appeared at eleven o’clock and asked me to order a copy of Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia for his friend Lizzy, whose birthday is on Tuesday. Mactaggart is one of the essential components of every Galloway book collection. The first edition of it was published in 1824, but it was almost immediately withdrawn from sale by the publisher because Mactaggart, the son of a Galloway farmer, had libelled a local dignitary. I’ve never seen a copy of the first edition, but thankfully enough of them survived for a publisher to reprint it, first in 1876 and again in 1981. It is a valuable record of the Galloway tongue, saved from oblivion by two far-sighted publishers. It is full of utterly wonderful local words and expressions from the Georgian era, many of which survive to this day. Here is one that I had never come across before, but which was clearly in common usage at the time of publication:

Cutty-Glies—a little squat-made female, extremely fond of the male creation, and good at winking or glying; hence the name cutty-glies. Poor girl, she frequently suffers much by her natural disposition: to be short and plain, it seems this is the class of females destined by some infernal law to become prostitutes.

In the afternoon I drove to Ayr to look at a book collection. I made the mistake of driving over the hills, which were covered in snow. I now see why the wheezing porn enthusiast from yesterday left his car ‘on the top.’ I arrived twenty minutes late, to be met by an elderly widow who showed me up four flights of stairs to her flat. The collection consisted largely of modern hardbacks in mint condition, but very little of interest. I took about 10 per cent of it, including one or two interesting antiquarian things and another copy of Scottish Castles, the title I sold this morning on Amazon for £75. Wrote her a cheque for £400.

Returned to find Alicia sitting silently in the kitchen while Eliot—the artistic director of the Wigtown Festival, and a good friend—conducted a telephone conversation with his wife and children on speakerphone in front of her. When he eventually finished talking to them, I cooked a Spanish chicken dish and he made patatas bravas. I used one tray. He used three frying pans, two saucepans and almost every herb and spice I had, and failed to wash up a single dish or put anything back where he found it. In fact, after we’d eaten, he sat and watched as Alicia and I tidied up.

Till Total £13.50

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