Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 32

Online orders: 2

Orders found: 2

I was an hour late opening the shop. Within five minutes of opening the door, the shop was full. Perhaps this is the secret: inconsistency with opening hours.

Order for book called Moles and Their Control.

Callum appeared at 12.30 p.m. and wandered off towards a friend’s house, where he thought he might be able to blag a free breakfast.

I dropped off the mail at the post office and picked up a copy of The Guardian. I’ve started to question whether the only reason I buy The Guardian is to outrage William’s right-wing sensibilities. Every time I buy it, he returns my change, muttering something about woolly liberals, or champagne socialists.

At one o’clock a woman came in with a bag of books, among which was a copy of Ludovic Kennedy’s In Bed with an Elephant that she’d bought in the shop eight years ago. She made a great fuss about the fact that it had been signed by him. When I checked the dedication on the title page, it read: ‘For David and Rosemary with best wishes, Ludovic Kennedy.’ David and Rosemary are my parents. He must have given them the book when he was here for the book festival several years ago. They must have given it to John, the previous owner, once they’d read it, and now it has come almost full circle.

Till Total £74

8 Customers

* The Open Book was Anna’s idea. Realising she couldn’t be the only person who daydreamed about running their own bookshop, she persuaded my parents to buy a shop in the middle of Wigtown, which is run as an Airbnb which anyone can rent in order to experience running a bookshop for a week. It is booked solid for the next three years and attracts visitors from all over the world.

† FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) is a service Amazon provides where booksellers can store their stock in one of Amazon’s warehouses (euphemistically named ‘fulfilment centres’). When orders come in for the books, they will package and send them out to customers. Although it solves the problem of not having enough space for books in the shop—as with almost every service that Amazon provides to third-party sellers, it comes at a cost which always leaves you on the brink of wondering whether it is worthwhile. Inevitably their ‘charges’ will multiply and keep creeping up to the point at which your margin is so tight that it’s almost suffocating. But not quite. Parasites prefer to keep their hosts alive.