Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 37

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After lunch a woman with the bearing of a retired headmistress brought in a box of books. They contained little of any interest, but I picked out two that I thought looked vaguely saleable: a scruffy copy of Songs of the Hebrides and an old school atlas. I offered her £10 for them, at which point she snatched them back and stormed off, saying, ‘I’ll just give them to the charity shop, in that case.’

Tomorrow I’ll go to the charity shop and buy them there for £5. There is a type of person who is convinced that everyone is determined to rip them off, and who obviously thinks that, by giving things they’ve been offered money for free to someone else, they will somehow be punishing the person who offered them the money. This is not how the world works.

I received a telephone call in the afternoon from a woman in the planning department telling me that someone has made a formal complaint about the concrete book spirals at the front of the shop. The spirals are two columns of books, arranged in a helix with an iron rod running through the centre of them, one on each side of the door into the shop. I used to make them from real books, coated in fibreglass resin, but they only lasted a couple of years before needing to be replaced, so I asked Norrie, a former employee, good friend and expert in all things concrete, if he could replace them with concrete ‘books.’ Possibly the most repeated ‘joke’ of the many often repeated ‘jokes’ that customers subject me to is to point at one of the books at the bottom of the column and ask ‘Can I have that one?’

The woman from the planning department sounded apologetic and clearly had no personal objections to the spirals but had a process to follow, so she’s going to send me a retrospective planning application. She seemed quite positive that it would all go through fine, but that there would be costs attached.

Till Total £139

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