People don’t always find it easy to walk into a strange shop. They are frightened: frightened perhaps that they will find themselves buying something they don’t really want, frightened they might make a fool of themselves. It is very easy to make a fool of yourself. I once went into a bank I found inside Victoria Station. I was on my way home from school and wanted to let my parents know which train I was catching. I suppose I should really have been looking for a telephone booth, but I was, if anything, even more frightened of telephones. So I found this bank instead and went in and said to the man behind the counter ‘I want to send a telegram’. And he looked startled and said ‘But this is a bank.’ Well, I knew it was. What I didn’t know was the difference between a bank and a post office. It is the fear of making this sort of mistake that keeps so many people out of bookshops: they are frightened of being told by a superior person in a superior voice: ‘Oh, no. We don’t sell that sort of book here, madam!’
This is why it is helpful if you can sell something else other than books – newspapers or cigarettes, for instance. It gets the nervous outsider into your shop. We used greetings cards for this purpose. We now use a revolving stand of paperbacks. We hated this stand when we were first given it and complained bitterly to the representative of the paperback publisher who provided it. ‘We like to keep your books in a proper order so that customers can see exactly what we’ve got, and so that if we are asked for a title we can quickly find it. In this stand nearly half the books are invisible.’ He said that this didn’t matter in the least. Customers mostly just wanted a good book, not a particular book. Grudgingly we accepted it, and as soon as we could we replaced it, and since he didn’t want it back, we were on the point of throwing it away. But suddenly Lesley had a bright idea. ‘Let’s put it just inside the doorway and fill it with all our most popular books.’ So we did, and it provides a sort of stepping stone for those who are too timid to come straight in.
Once someone is properly inside, it is reasonable to assume that, if he has not just come in to escape the rain or to while away half an hour until his wife is finished at the hairdresser up the road, he does genuinely want to buy a book and will be disappointed if he has to go out empty-handed. It is also reasonable to assume that somewhere in the shop is a book that will suit him. It is therefore up to us to bring the two together. And gradually we learned the best way to do it, how best to approach each type of customer, how best to arrange our books in their shelves (though there is always room for improvement, always room for argument here), how best to introduce book and customer, giving the customer a choice but not too baffling a choice, helping him to make up his mind, and finally how best to ensure that he is happy with what he has bought and so will come back another day.
So we are indeed professional salesmen after all with an armoury of techniques every bit as subtle and elaborate and carefully perfected as those taught to smooth young men in smart grey suits; and bookselling to us is not just bookselling but also bookselling, the one every bit as fascinating as the other. It is, I suspect, a little like the fascination of angling. The angler must learn his river and his equipment, his fish and their habits. He may well ask his wife to cook what he has caught, because after all fish is food and man must eat; but the pleasure he finds by the river lies not so much in thoughts of supper but rather in the exercise of his knowledge and of his skill. And with us there is a further bonus. Our fish, we like to think, are the happier for being caught.
AUTHORS
On September 6th, a fortnight after we had opened, Eric Williams came into the shop and introduced himself; and from this encounter sprang that wariness towards authors that I have felt ever since. It is akin to the feeling I get when approached by a salesman, for this is indeed what the author so often becomes in a bookshop. Do I have his book in stock? Why not? Publisher not doing his job! Will write to him and get him to send me a dozen copies . . . and so on. Of course I have my answers. ‘I’ve not got your book because I decided against it: it’s not the sort of book my customers buy. Please don’t write to your publisher, who knows this as well as I do. In any case what I stock is my own affair.’ I can say this sort of thing to the professional salesman to whom accepting a ‘No’ is as much a part of his job as welcoming a ‘Yes’. But an author is different. However aggressive he may be (and he can be surprisingly aggressive) and however tough his armour may seem, my rejection of his book will penetrate it and will wound him. So partly there is a feeling of ‘Don’t you try and teach me my job’ and partly there may be a feeling of ‘I don’t want to be unkind’; and then there is the peculiarity of the author-bookseller relationship in which each sees himself at the top of a pyramid with the other at the bottom. For to the author the bookseller is one of thousands engaged in distributing his book, while to the bookseller the author is one of thousands whose books he distributes. ‘Oh why,’ I wrote in my journal that evening, ‘don’t Great Authors realize that there are other authors, and that if we are not selling Williams it might possibly be that we are busy selling Chaucer instead.’
Yet I ought to have been selling Williams as well as Chaucer: indeed I ought to have been selling him a great deal better. The Wooden Horse published in 1949 had been a staggering success. Its sequel, The Tunnel, had come out in the spring. Collins had told us all about it, told us too that Eric Williams and his wife were coming to live in our area. We had been forewarned. It was just that, thoroughly inexperienced, we lacked confidence. Was The Wooden Horse still selling? Would its sequel sell at all? What difference would it make that the author was living six miles away? Undoubtedly if we had been bolder we could have sold both books a lot better than we did. And indeed we might have done so if Williams hadn’t been so pressing. As I wrote in my Journal, ‘He wanted me to put on a show for him. His idea of a show is streamers all over the town, invitations to all the gentry, town-crier out with his bell and finally a Civic Reception in the Guildhall.’ A two-week-old bookseller naturally recoiled from that sort of thing; and fortunately for all of us the idea was quietly dropped. ‘On his way out he said he would fetch me some display material from his car to enable me to start a little advance publicity. Then, pausing at the door, he said casually, “How’s The Tunnel doing?” I told him I had sold one copy so far; and I saw his eye fixing on the single copy of The Wooden Horse that now sat all alone on its shelf. At that point I should have said “Oh, good. I see we’ve just sold another.” But I didn’t because we hadn’t. He looked thoughtful, and I guessed what he was thinking; and I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t come back with his posters.’
But a year later we had greater self confidence. Peter Churchill’s book, Of Their Own Choice, had just been published and the author was to visit the Royal Naval College to talk about it and his experiences with the French Resistance during the War. Would we like him, asked his publisher, to call on us while he was in Dartmouth and sign copies in our shop?
This seemed a great compliment at the time, and perhaps it was. Now however the Grand Tour with its visits to bookshops alternating between lectures, television appearances, radio and press interviews and the like has become a normal way of promoting a new book. And I have become a little cynical. The signing session! How nice, of course, if it succeeds; but if it doesn’t, never mind. No harm is done. No harm, that is, to the publisher. No matter to him if now and again the author seats himself at a table, walled in by copies of his works, sits and waits – and waits in vain while customers come and go and occasionally stop to stare or ask him where the birthday cards are kept – and then, his stint over, creeps off to his next appointment. True, the author may feel a little sad. True, the bookseller may feel a little embarrassed. But equally he might never have been very enthusiastic in the first place.
‘Yes, all right,’ he might have replied to the publisher. ‘If you’ll do all the publicity for us – posters and adverts – we can provide him with a table and a chair.’
This may be possible in a large and busy bookshop,
where the manager, having greeted the author, can then drift off and occupy himself with more important matters. In a small shop, however, it is not so easy. The seated author, the hovering proprietors, the total lack of any customers at all: no this was not to be contemplated. So if we were to do it at all, we must do it properly. Shall we or shan’t we? Come on, let’s try!
‘Certainly,’ we replied, ‘provided you allow us to arrange a Literary Lunch so that the town as well as the College can hear his story.’
This was the first of our Literary Lunches, and we held two more the two following years. They were all successful, and we sold a lot of books at each. We found them nerve-racking, yes, but exciting and exhilarating beyond belief. We held them in late autumn and the impetus they gave to our sales and the esteem they brought to our shop lasted through to Christmas, while the exhilaration and the pleasure they brought to Lesley and to me lasts, warmly remembered, to this day. In 1953 the book we chose was Bandoola by J. H. Williams (Elephant Bill) and in 1954 it was The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell. I say ‘we chose’, not ‘we were offered and accepted’, because this was how it was. We were not part of any publisher’s publicity campaign. This was a private arrangement between ourselves and the author. And so ideally it should always be, and if any young bookseller cares for my advice, it is this. First, choose a book you know you can sell; secondly, choose a time of year when you know you can sell it; thirdly, thank the publisher for his kind offer but say you would prefer to fix up all your own publicity; and fourthly, try to arrange for the signing session to be preceded by some sort of a function – a lunch or a lecture, for instance – that will ensure a good crowd of people waiting to welcome the author, eager – afterwards – to queue for his book. For it is easier by far to be one of a jostling crowd saying ‘I’d like one too’ than it is to approach the solitary seated figure across an empty shop if you’re not quite sure what the book is about or whether you really want it or not.
Yes, exciting and exhilarating these occasions most certainly were – but also, as I have said, nerve-racking; and it was for this reason that we never made them a regular feature of our bookshop life. For although all was well in the end, the fear of failure would haunt us right up to the last hour. In the end we managed to sell enough tickets – the dining-room looked comfortably full, the seats in the lecture hall were mostly occupied – but, oh, my beloved Dartmouth customers, why did you always leave it to the last agonizing hour before you made up your minds? Today I look along our bookshelves at home and count those books with their special inscriptions. There are ten of them. Ten visits in twenty-five years, not many, but all the more memorable for that. Ten authors, hand-picked, well-chosen, charmers every one of them. We are proud to have met them. We bask still in the memory of the brief hours we spent in their company.
BOOKS FOR SCHOOLS
‘Don’t just wait for customers to come to you,’ we had been told. ‘Go out and find them.’ So in October, 1951, I loaded my briefcase and caught the bus up the hill to Thurlestone College; and that evening in my journal I recorded my first experience as a travelling salesman.
‘I had a little difficulty finding the way in and possibly I chose the wrong door. Inside it was very dark. There were stairs in front of me and I felt my way cautiously down them, and at the bottom came upon the dim figure of a man, who, to my slight surprise, seemed to be expecting me. Without asking me who I was, he led me into his study, and when we were seated, told me all about the school. From this I decided that he was not, as at first I had thought, the caretaker, but the headmaster. I learned that he trained boys for entry into the Royal Naval College and similar establishments, that he did this with considerable success and at a very modest fee. All this he explained in some detail and at some length, and then, slipping easily from one subject to another, he asked me why I had called, and while I was explaining, went on to tell me about some of his more remarkable former pupils. Eventually his eye fell on my briefcase and he asked if I had anything in it I would like to show him. I said, “Yes” and while I was getting it open he told me all about himself. . . . We parted most cordially and with his assurance that if he ever needed a book he would most certainly get it from me, as he was keen to support local traders.
‘All the same I thought it best not to be too optimistic. Doubting if the prospects of business that I had opened up justified the expense of a second bus fare, I walked home.’
This was my first attempt to get what is known as ‘institutional business’, and it was, of course, a failure. There were two other very small private schools in Dartmouth and I tried them both with equal lack of success; small private schools just don’t have the money to buy books. I tried the Naval College and their librarian called, was most charming and polite, said he had practically no money, chose three books from our shelves (one of which I remember to my surprise was Dracula) and promised to return another day. Dartmouth State Schools were equally polite but explained that they had to order their books from the County Contractor. Finally we called on the County Librarian in Exeter and at last found someone who was both able and willing to spend money with us. He never in fact spent much, but his occasional orders were always welcome.
And there things stuck throughout the fifties. We might perhaps have gone further afield, offered our services to other richer private schools. But presumably they were already buying their books from someone, and if they were happy what right had we to try and persuade them to come to us instead? What special advantages could we offer? None, really. And that was why in 1956 when we needed to expand we expanded upwards into our Gift Gallery: at that time there seemed little hope of any great increase in our book sales.
Then in 1960 everything changed and changed most dramatically. I can give both the place and the exact date: it was at Dartington Hall and the date was May 28th.
At this point, in order that what follows should make sense, I must break off and say a little more about the book trade.
I have said already that our books have fixed retail prices and that this was one of the advantages of selling new books. I could have gone further and said that this is the one thing that makes it possible to be a proper bookseller at all.
Not all books sell equally well. There are the popular books that sell in their hundreds of thousands and there are the less popular books that sell only in thousands. Yet judged by almost any standard other than popularity the latter are often the better. So it is perhaps not unreasonable that we should ask the popular to help sustain the good. This help is needed by both the publisher and the bookseller. Each needs the high sales and high profits from the one to offset the low sales and low profits from the other. Of course we could easily wash our hands of the unpopular. We could say, ‘To Hell with quality: quantity is all we care about. Money is everything.’ And of course there are people who do say this; and since in a free fight they would almost certainly win, the law offers protection to the others. The publisher is protected against piracy by the Law of Copyright, the bookseller is protected against undercutting by the Net Book Agreement.8 The Net Book Agreement allows publishers to fix the selling price of any book they wish and to take legal action against anyone who sells it to the public at less than this price. Since the Net Book Agreement is designed to protect the bookseller, it is obvious that publishers will only ‘net’ those books which need the services of the bookseller for their promotion and distribution. These are known as ‘general books’ to distinguish them from those books which the bookseller may well handle but which normally he neither stocks nor promotes, namely ‘school textbooks’. School textbooks have a price but it is not a fixed or ‘net’ price, and so they are called ‘non-net’ books, and schools buying them can hope to buy them at a discount off this price if their order is large enough. The bookseller also naturally buys at a discount from the publisher. The discount he gets on a net book is about a third, and this is to finance not just the wrapping up and handing over but also the cost of stocking and d
isplaying and the risk that this involves. On non-net books he gets a lower discount, about a sixth, and this is because he does less work: he simply handles the orders that the schools send him.
Now although schools buy a lot of textbooks, they may also buy general books; indeed they may sometimes use general books as textbooks; and in fact on average a school will spend 65% of its money on textbooks and 35% on general books. On the former it can hope for a discount but on the latter, no matter how many copies of any particular book it may order, no discount is allowed. Hence there is an illogicality: where the bookseller gets the larger discount from the publisher he keeps it all, where he gets the smaller discount he is allowed to give part of it away, thus lowering his profit even further. This causes difficulties, for it means that when a bookseller offers a discount on non-net books, part at least of this discount is in consideration of the net books that he hopes the school will also want to buy from him. Indeed competition between booksellers can be such that non-net books are often supplied at a loss where the net book order is big enough.
So now we come to the ‘contract’. With a private school this will be between school and bookseller. With a state school it will be between Local Education Authority and ‘Contractor’. The contractor may be an ordinary bookseller like me or he may specialize as a ‘school supplier’, possibly supplying stationery as well. He may be small and local or large and distant. It is for the Local Authority to decide not only who gets it but what form the contract is to take. It can go to a single supplier or it can be divided among several. Schools may be compelled to order all their books from the contractor or they may be free to buy some where they please. There are endless variations but whatever is decided on, the Authority will probably start by inviting tenders and almost the only way in which tenders can be judged is by the amount of discount offered. The supplier who offers the highest discount on non-net books will probably win the contract. Since good service costs money, the higher the discount, the worse the service. However, since bad service is expected and accepted, and since nobody knows who is to blame (for everyone blames someone else) or how much better the service might be if the discount were less, everyone is more or less happy – until a contractor optimistically offers and an Authority gleefully accepts a rather over-generous discount. And then the contractor can’t pay his bills, publishers refuse to supply him and children sit at their desks with nothing to study. This happens from time to time.
The Path Through the Trees Page 19
