Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 42

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At 10 a.m. I lit the fire in the drawing room above the shop for the old ladies’ art class. They meet here every Tuesday during the winter, and paint en plein air during the summer.

After lunch I drove to Kirkpatrick Durham, a pretty village about ten miles from Dumfries, to look at some books that a woman had called me about last week. They had belonged to her late husband. The house was a whitewashed cottage at the end of a farm road, and the books were a collection of A. G. Street hardbacks in dust jackets. The woman selling the books seemed reluctant to part with them, as they were clearly her husband’s favourite books. He had grown up on a farm in Sussex, she had spent her life in Birmingham, and they’d met on a trip to St Kilda in their fifties. Sadly, he died of cancer two years ago.

A. G. Street was a Wiltshire farmer who wrote about agriculture during the 1930s, and whose works were immensely popular in their time but, like many others, have fallen into relative obscurity. We’re still occasionally asked for his books, but the frequency of these requests is decreasing like the intervals of breath of a dying animal. Kirkpatrick Durham too is an interesting place, if for nothing more than the achievement of its most famous son, Kirkpatrick Macmillan. Born there in 1812, Macmillan is credited with inventing the bicycle, an achievement for which he was widely recognised during his lifetime, but for which he took little credit or acclaim, refusing even to patent the invention.

The books weren’t in great condition, but I gave her £40 for two boxes and headed home.

My mother dropped in at four o’clock to tell me that Jessie from The Picture Shop died this morning. The gravity of the moment was lightened slightly when my mother decided to tell Elaine, one of the art class (very deaf, and an old friend of my mother), about Jessie’s sad demise. I’m not quite sure how, but Elaine misunderstood completely and thought that Jessie was retiring and that Anna was taking over her shop. On hearing what she thought were glad tidings, she announced, ‘Oh, that is such wonderful news.’

Just before closing, a man wearing a flamboyant paisley bow tie brought in six boxes of books, mainly hardbacks in excellent condition, with the focus on art and gardening. I told him that I’d go through them and work out a price by tomorrow lunchtime.

Till Total £67.50

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