Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 22

Online orders: 5

Orders found: 5

Cold, clear day. One of today’s orders was for a copy of Putnam’s Blackburn Aircraft since 1909, which came from a bewigged widow in Leeds over a year ago. Since then we’ve listed 5,000 books, which makes an average of 16 books listed per day. Not a huge quantity but sufficient, considering all the other jobs which drain time every day.

My father dropped in for a chat. We discussed Any Human Heart, which he’d finished on Sunday. He seemed to like it, although he criticised the title for containing the word ‘heart,’ as it might be off-putting to men. While we were discussing it, an old man came into the shop with a leather bag slung over his shoulder, full of books that he wanted to sell. I picked out a few, mainly erotica and devil-worship, and gave him £25. My father looked less than impressed that I was buying such sordid material.

At 2.30 a woman brought in what she described as ‘antique and collectable’ books. I understood this to mean books about antiques and collectables, but instead it was a plastic crate full of shabby mid-Victorian era fiction—a genre that is almost unsellable in the shop unless it is by someone well known (Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, the Brontës etc.). I bought two purely because they appealed to my puerile sense of humour: The Sauciest Boy in the Service and The Cock-House at Fellgarth.

A customer came to the counter and asked if we had any miniature books so I directed him to the cabinet labelled ‘Miniature Books.’ He looked at it, then back at me and said, ‘Yes, I’ve already looked through that.’ This often happens—people appear to imagine that we have a secret stash of ‘the good stuff’ that we don’t really want to sell.

Telephone call from a woman in Portpatrick who has books to sell, so I suggested that she bring them over in the morning.

Till Total £32

4 Customers