Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 66

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This morning I drove to a house near Maybole (about an hour away) to look at a private library. The books were in a house that I’ve been to before, owned by a widow. The last time there was some excellent antiquarian material. Today there was nothing much of great value, apart from a 1753 copy of The Trial of James Stewart—for what is known in Scotland as The Appin Murder, the story on which Robert Louis Stevenson based Kidnapped. Stevenson’s father had picked up a copy of the same edition—possibly even the same copy—of The Trial of James Stewart in a bookshop in Inverness, and given it to RLS, and from that the seed of what would become Kidnapped was planted. Stevenson even obliquely refers to this edition of the book by calling his protagonist (the only important character not based on a real person) David Balfour: The Trial of James Stewart was published by Hamilton and Balfour.

In the middle of the afternoon an ex-soldier called Adam Short came to the shop. He’s walking anticlockwise around the coast of the UK and has been going for 366 days. He needed a bed for the night, so we put him up in the warehouse, where he seemed delighted, despite the fairly rudimentary conditions. I can’t help thinking that timing his trip to be in the north of the UK precisely when the days are shortest and the weather at its worst might not have been the most sensible idea.

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