Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 72

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Nicky and I had breakfast together, then she opened the shop, so I went back to bed for an hour.

After lunch there was a telephone call from Maria (who takes care of the catering in the Writers’ Retreat during the festival) in as much of a panic as she ever gets (a mild fluster) to ask if she could use the shop as a venue for her pop-up restaurant, the Galloway Supper Club. Apparently the place she had lined up had double-booked so she can’t use it. I happily agreed to let her use the shop. The event is next Friday night.

After lunch a customer—an elderly woman—was tutting loudly and complaining in the orange Penguin section of the shop, so I asked her if there was a problem. She embarked on a lengthy complaint about the fact that some of the titles on the spines read from bottom to top, and some from top to bottom, so she kept having to tilt her head in different directions, and told me that I should arrange them all so that the titles could be read from top to bottom. This would mean putting quite a few of them upside down, and since she’s the only person ever to have made this complaint, I told her that I wasn’t prepared to indulge her request.

As far as I’m aware, there is no convention in the world of publishing as to whether spine titles read in a particular direction. On the whole, they tend to read from top to bottom, with the publisher’s name or logo at the base of the spine, but plenty of them read the other way. The only convention seems to be that the publisher’s logo appears at the bottom.

Before she left, Nicky gave me a small booklet called What Does the Bible Really Teach? Apparently it’s standard issue for Jehovah’s Witnesses when they’re doorstepping people. Her parting words were ‘Right, you. I want you to read two paragraphs of that every week. And I’ll be testing you next time I see you.’

After she’d gone, I took advantage of the ever-lengthening days and went for a walk down along the old railway line. It’s a pretty walk, even from the shop down to the bottom of the hill, past the row of Georgian houses on the sloping Bank Street, then the ruined Norman church with its view south down across the frequently flooded fields, and after that along the railway line, with the salt marsh to the left, heavily populated with thousands of geese at this time of year, waiting for their breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland to thaw before they migrate north again.

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