Consequently when people say to us: ‘What lovely, lovely books. If I had a bookshop I would just read and read all day: I’d never want to sell a thing,’ we smile politely – and change the subject. There is immense pleasure in book reading, but it has nothing to do with bookselling.
So what sort of books do we sell? This question is usually accompanied by an amazement that we sell anything at all. ‘Do people buy books these days? They are so expensive, aren’t they’. Yes, luckily for us they do; and perhaps it would be helpful if I first tried to show why.
I was once – a very long time ago – invited to give a talk entitled ‘Why buy books?’ I remember it vividly because the clergyman who introduced me thought I was going to talk about the ten books I would take with me to a desert island, and began his introduction by telling the audience which ten books he would take to his desert island. So when my turn came I had to start by apologizing that this wasn’t what I had been asked to talk about at all. . . . As I have already said, one mustn’t confuse a desire to buy books with a desire to read them. Booksellers are not in competition with librarians: the two serve different needs.
People buy books for one of several possible reasons. They may buy them to give away as presents; they may buy them because they need them to refer to; they may buy them because they are collecting books on a particular subject; they may buy a book because, having enjoyed reading it, they now wish to possess it; they may buy it for its decorative qualities; or they may simply buy it because everyone else is buying it. These (with one more to follow) are the main reasons; and there will be a host of minor reasons – because the copy borrowed from a friend has just been eaten by the dog, and so on. . . . In all these cases the book is intended to last, and it may very well physically outlast the purpose for which it was originally bought. This is a pity, for it then merely clutters up its owner’s shelves, providing a bad excuse for not buying any more books.
People will go to all sorts of extremes to avoid putting their dead books on the bonfire or out with the rubbish, and astonishingly – they are proudly convinced that this shows them to be true book lovers. On the contrary, they are the enemies of literature! For it is this attitude that discourages the buying of books solely for the pleasure of reading them. In particular it discourages the buying of novels.
Fortunately it is an attitude that does not seem to extend to paperbacks. Paperbacks are in the magazine class: expendable; read, then thrown away (or more usually left for someone else to throw away). So this gives us our final category: people buy books to read provided they are in paperback.
Having seen why we can now consider what.
If we had chosen a larger town we could, perhaps, have afforded to specialize. We could have stocked only those books that we liked or books on those subjects that interested us. But in a town the size of Dartmouth, though our stock may betray certain prejudices, we must be general booksellers, aiming to satisfy all tastes, not just our own, selling all – or virtually all – that we find saleable, and consequently selling a great many books on subjects about which we know very little.
Thus we sell hardcover books on yachting and fishing, on Devon, on natural history, on cookery and gardening, on a great variety of crafts, on old things (boats, trains, antiques, etc.), on the instruments of destruction (tanks, aeroplanes, warships, etc.). We sell the obvious reference books and the sort of safe classics that get chosen as school prizes. We sell ‘best-sellers’ (the more popular novels and biographies). We sell paperbacks on all subjects. And lastly – and I’ll have more to say about this later – we sell children’s books. Add it all up and – to the surprise of those who equate books with culture – you will find that we sell relatively little that can be said to possess literary merit. Poetry, novels, biographies, belles lettres, history: these in hardcover do badly and their authors, with few exceptions, must survive on their sales to public libraries – and then hope to get into paperback.
‘Lovely, lovely books,’ says our customer, looking around her and trying again. ‘If I had a fortune, I would buy them all!’ A very catholic book buyer she must be, with a remarkably wide range of interests. . . . For our part we might perhaps contemplate inviting one book in a hundred into our house. I doubt if it would be more than that. Yet this doesn’t mean that we dislike the other ninety-nine. Very far from it.
Books are like people. You may like a person without necessarily wanting to ask him home for supper. You may like a book without necessarily wanting either to read or to possess it. So it is with the books in our shop. We know them all, we like them all, we enjoy their companionship, because to a bookseller a book is not something to read; it is something to handle, something to sell. To a bookseller a good book is one that is well designed and well made, and the handling of it – holding it, feeling it, opening it, turning the pages, letting the eye fall upon the printed word – gives him immense pleasure. I know little and care nothing about – for instance – armoured fighting vehicles, yet I know that in Dartmouth there are many people with a passion for tanks. I can recognize a well-designed, well-produced tank book when I am shown one, and it gives me great pleasure to order it, stock it, display it and even introduce it to a customer with my personal recommendation. Does it seem wrong that I am prepared to say ‘Here is a good book,’ when I have done no more than glance at it? How can I judge a book I have never read on a subject about which I know nothing? The answer is that I can because I enlist the help of others – the publisher, reviewers, other customers. My personal judgement is confined to the book’s production, its look and feel. I leave it to the expert to judge its contents.
I have said that though we are a general bookshop our stock may display prejudices; and of course it does. It displays the prejudices of Dartmouth – so many books on sailing, so few on cricket; novels about the sea rather than sex; biographies of Tories rather than Socialists. It also displays our own. To a large extent we must follow the tastes and interests of our customers. To some small extent, however, we can attempt to lead them; and one of the most fascinating and exciting sides to bookselling is to see how far ahead we can go and how many of our customers we can carry with us. It may be a single book, one that we feel to have some special merit, not an obvious bestseller but one surely deserving our support, deserving to be read. All right, let us take a chance. Let us buy not just our usual cautious one or two copies; let us take a dozen and then really try to sell it. Or it may be a particular subject or attitude for which we have an especial sympathy or feel the stirrings of a crusading zeal. The vicar might have made it the theme of a sermon; or the editor of the local paper might have devoted an editorial to it. We, when the representative comes to it, say ‘Yes. That’s one I’d like.’ And we add it to our order. Or perhaps we may be not for it but against it, and then we say, ‘No. Not that book.’ And the representative is surprised, perhaps even a little indignant, struggling to hide his anger or his scorn, trying to remain polite. ‘But it is selling fantastically well. You’re the first shop to refuse it.’ Can anybody be so perverse, turning away good money like this? ‘I’m sorry but this is my shop and you must allow me to run it my way.’
So we choose our books, influenced by the likes and dislikes of our customers and also of ourselves, seeing each book (or rather trying to visualize each book) as a rectangular object to be handled and looked at as well as read. How many copies? One? Two? Four? Ten? We tend to play safe. Better too few than too many. We can always reorder. It is not so easy to return unsold copies.
And then the books arrive and we have to sell them. Yes, it’s one thing to picture a bookseller as a person who lives and moves in a world of books – even if it is not quite such a cultured, ‘Eng. Lit.’ sort of world as one had perhaps imagined. But it is quite another thing to put the accent on the second half of his name; for isn’t there something not quite nice about selling? Isn’t it all a bit commercial? And the librarian, sitting at his desk in the Public Library, feels smugly superior. H
e is not involved with money in this rather sordid way. His success is measured in ‘issues’, not ‘net profit’. This is the difference between us: the one is a member of a learned profession; the other is engaged in trade.
Anybody with this sort of attitude towards selling should not become – and in any case would not long remain – a bookseller. For bookselling most emphatically involves both books and selling; and so, having said something about the one, I must now turn to the other.
SELLING
The man who, encouraged perhaps by a remark of Emerson’s, made a mousetrap and then waited for the world to beat a path through the woods to his door, would have waited in vain unless he had first done something, however hesitantly, however reluctantly to inform the world of his existence. Everyone of us who earns a living is earning it by selling something he has – a product, a skill – to someone who wants it. Everyone with something to sell must first promote it, advertise it, look for likely buyers.
He may find that this does not take up much of his time, so that having once nailed up his sign board or found his employer, he can then get on with his trade. Or he may find that it takes up a lot of his time; and he may well enjoy it.
Thus you have two extremes of attitude towards selling. At the one extreme are the makers who, if they are also their own salesmen, see their job as finding people who want what they have to offer; and at the other extreme are the salesmen who see it as persuading people to want what they have to offer. To the maker what matters most is what he has to sell; to the salesman what matters is success. What he is selling is almost irrelevant.
Where between these extremes does the bookseller stand? The answer is that he can stand where he likes. He can see himself as a professional salesman, his job simply to get books moving out of his shop as fast as possible in exchange for money moving in. Such a bookseller once horrified the book trade by suggesting, loudly and publicly, that books could and should be sold like soap. Or he can see himself as a sort of maker, not making the books, of course, but making his shop and then, as it were, making marriages between book and customer. So for him books matter, and the final wrapping up, handing over, taking of money and giving of change is only a very small part of his work.
Where did we stand? Does the question need to be asked? For you have only to start listing the qualities required in a professional salesman to see at once how few of them I possess. Hedda saw this well enough. They saw it at John Lewis. Probably the Sales Manager of the Encyclopaedia Publisher saw it when I presented myself for interview. And certainly I see it myself in the bookshop when I meet the professional on his rounds. In he comes, instantly recognizable, smartly dressed, highly polished all over, radiating self confidence and after-shave, all set to make his killing. Poor shabby, shambling, provincial bookseller! He seizes him by the hand and wishes him a very good morning, flicks open his briefcase and starts doing conjuring tricks with its contents. Does it make any difference what he is selling? Advertising space, insurance, it’s all the same. ‘Just sign here, Sir. They’ll invoice you from the office.’
But if I recoil from the professional, it is because I cannot buy from this sort of person in this sort of way, not because I dislike buying things. And if I cannot myself adopt his techniques, it is because I am not myself a salesman by nature, not because I dislike or disapprove of selling or feel it in some way undignified.
In fact I enjoy both buying and selling, particularly when what is being bought or sold is books. Books – new books, that is – have two things in their favour. In the first place they are introduced to us not by a ‘salesman’, thank goodness, but by a ‘representative’ – a word which implies, usually correctly, someone who shares my attitude towards doing business. So we meet as equals and sit down together and discuss his books. We do not manoeuvre for position in order to do battle with each other. The books are allowed to sell themselves; there is no pushing. That is the first thing; and there is no further problem with buying. You have only to announce that you have become a bookseller and representatives will soon be queueing up to see you, undaunted in our case by the fact that they first had to queue up to cross the river on our ferry. The second thing in favour of new books is that they all have fixed selling prices. So at least we are spared the arguing, the haggling, the trying to get for three-and-six what is clearly priced at five shillings, that so blighted our venture into secondhand bookselling.
However, books have one great disadvantage compared with gifts. With gifts we usually hope to establish what are called ‘sole agencies’ which ensure that the manufacturers who supply us do not also supply our nearby competitors. With books this cannot happen since every bookshop is free to buy from every publisher. So although to some extent individual shops will show individual characteristics, the universally popular books – the ‘bestsellers’ – will usually be stocked by them all. Why then, since the book will be the same and cost the same in each, should a customer favour one shop rather than another? It can only be because one shop in some way gives better service. So although we could promote our books, saying: ‘These are good books,’ at the same time we had to promote our shop – and indeed (like it or not) ourselves – saying: ‘Ours is a good shop and we are good booksellers.’ And this we found less easy.
First we chose a town in which there was no other private bookseller. Naturally, had he been a good bookseller this would have made the task of establishing ourselves very much harder and our excuse for trying to do so very much smaller. But whether he had been good or not it would have meant our setting up in opposition to someone else, trying to persuade the public to come to us rather than go to him: and this we would not have enjoyed. Admittedly there was in Dartmouth a branch of W. H. Smith: we could hardly expect to have the field entirely to ourselves. But the difference between a private bookshop and the branch of a well established chain was, we felt, great enough for there to be no animosity between us. Then we chose a name that we could shelter behind. Not Milne & Milne but The Harbour Bookshop – which allowed us to boast about the shop without giving the impression that we were boasting about ourselves. And initially our self-promotion amounted to little more than saying: ‘Here we are’. Fortunately this was fairly obvious since our site was a good one. (Our attempts to say who we were were less successful; our fascia board didn’t appear until three weeks after we had opened and was then virtually illegible.) After that we could turn our attention to promoting our books.
The simplest way to promote books is to put them on display and the best place to display them is the shop window. And it was when arranging our window that we became conscious of another characteristic that books possess: they have voices; and our job as window dresser was to see that they were saying the right thing to the right people in the most effective way.
So we were like the puppeteer who, standing unseen, pulls unseen strings; or like the conductor of the orchestra who, silent himself, gets the best from each instrumentalist. Each book has its own individual voice, saying ‘I am me: buy me!’ Some books say this very loudly, clearly and persuasively. You put them in the window and people at once know all about them and come hurrying in for them. These are our soloists, and probably our best soloist when we opened was The Cruel Sea. Other books are better in chorus. ‘We are cookery books. We are gardening books. There are lots more of us inside.’ Some books speak for themselves. Books with titles like Devon or Sea Fishing for Beginners need no help from us: they say exactly what they are. But Jim Davis needs a little notice pointing out that it is an exciting smuggling story with a Dartmouth setting. Only those with the best voices qualify for the window or for display face forwards inside the shop, and each must be carefully chosen not just for what it has to say but to whom we want it said. For this is important, too. Who are the people we are addressing? Who are the people walking along the pavement outside? Are they holiday-makers visiting the town for the first time and so needing to be told what a wide range of books we stock? Or are they our resid
ents who (we trust) know this already and so can be told something else?
Thus gradually we began to understand what it is that makes books saleable and learned how to make the most of their saleability. And parallel with this we began to understand what makes people come in and buy them.
Before you can get someone to come into your shop – assuming he hadn’t all along intended to do so – indeed before you can get him to look at your window, you have to attract his attention. You have to say ‘Stop!’ In our early days, when we lived over the shop, we had a cat who lived with us, and every now and then, because it was warm and sunny there, he climbed into our window. He sat very still. He made no noise. But he was saying ‘Stop!’ and he was saying it very well. We have to use other devices now, but I doubt if any can do it better.
Having stopped the passer-by, you then have to hold his attention. We found that the best way to do this was to give him something to read. People seem to like reading things, and they particularly like reading things aloud to each other. I learned this when a notice was nailed to the wall below my office window. The notice gave information about a nearby building. I never read it myself, but I heard it read aloud so many times that I almost knew it by heart.
First ‘Stop’ then ‘Look’ and finally ‘Come in’, and this is best said by the books themselves – with perhaps a helping word or two from us. The difficulty is that you never know how well they are doing it. It is obvious enough if someone, handing over a pile of purchases, says: ‘And I only came in for that card I saw in your window’. But much more often you have no idea what brings people in; and more important than that, you don’t know what has kept the others out.
The Path Through the Trees Page 18
