Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 51

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Email this morning from an Irish customer who is interested in a very early Irish railway book we have in stock, dated 1836, asking what my ‘best price’ would be. The book is priced at £900. I offered it to him for £775. He told me that he’d think about it.

On my way up to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I had the grave misfortune to be passing an overweight elderly male customer in grey polyester trousers as he bent over to look at a book on a lower shelf. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a visible Y-front line, and I very much hope it will be the last.

A large man with a beard, ponytail and crutches spent an hour crashing around the shop, knocking things over, then looking at me and saying, ‘That honestly was nothing to do with me.’

Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence and many other excellent books, came to speak to the readers’ group this afternoon. After chatting with her I discovered that my sister used to go out with her nephew. As she was popping out for a cigarette, she spotted the Einstein quotation (‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former’) on the counter and asked, ‘Are you sure he said that? It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing he’d have said.’

Supper with readers’ group. Bed at 1.30 a.m.

Till Total £184.99

20 Customers