Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 54

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Very unusual for there to be only one order on a Monday morning, I’d normally expect six or seven.

Quite often in the winter, if I’m working in the shop, I hear the door open and expect a customer to appear, but at this time of year it is as likely to be a passing local who on seeing Captain, the cat, sitting outside the shop staring at the door handle will open it enough to let him in, then close it behind him. Today it happened three times.

Peter Howie, an engineer from Creetown—across the bay from Wigtown—brought in six boxes of his mother-in-law’s books. Went through them. Only about two boxes’ worth were of interest, so I offered him £60. One of the more interesting books was a Victorian book of lithographic illustrations of India, but since it had been bound using gutta-percha, the binding had perished and the illustrations had become loose and had been damaged. Most books bound in gutta-percha eventually reach this state; there must be something in its chemical make-up that defies longevity. During the second half of the nineteenth century, gutta-percha (the rubbery sap from the Palaquium tree) was seen as a sort of industrial panacea: it was used to make everything from golf balls to fillings for teeth to electrical insulation (the first transatlantic telegraph cable was insulated in it). It was also used, briefly, in book manufacturing. Traditionally ‘gatherings’ (huge sheets of paper, with 16 pages printed on them, folded so as to produce 8 leaves in octavo bindings) would be sewn together over cords on the spines to produce books, but it was far quicker (and cheaper) to glue them using gutta-percha. After the discovery of vulcanisation, gutta-percha became all but redundant, but books from this window in history do still occasionally turn up, invariably in the same condition.

My mobile phone charger has become temperamental. Now it only charges when the phone is face down.

Till Total £77.48

8 Customers