Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops
Page 1
SEVEN KINDS OF PEOPLE YOU FIND IN BOOKSHOPS
ALSO BY SHAUN BYTHELL
The Diary of a Bookseller
Confessions of a Bookseller
SEVEN KINDS OF PEOPLE YOU FIND IN BOOKSHOPS
SHAUN BYTHELL
For Lena and Freya
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
Profile Books Ltd
29 Cloth Fair
London
EC1A 7JQ
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Shaun Bythell, 2020
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Dante by MacGuru Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78816 658 4
eISBN 978 1 78283 774 9
Contents
Introduction
1: Genus: Peritus (Expert)
2: Genus: Familia Juvenis (Young Family)
3: Genus: Homo qui maleficas amat (Occultist)
4: Genus: Homo qui desidet (Loiterer)
5: Genus: Senex cum barba (Bearded Pensioner)
6: Genus: Viator non tacitus (The Not-So-Silent Traveller)
7: Genus: Parentum historiae studiosus (Family Historian)
Bonus
8: Genus: Operarii (Staff)
Postscript
Introduction
In his preface to Antiquarian Books: An Insider’s Account (David & Charles, 1978) Roy Harley Lewis wrote that ‘the role played by antiquarian books in world trade is, financially, quite insignificant’. That is putting a flattering spin on it. If you replace the word ‘antiquarian’ with ‘second-hand’, then the financial impact on the global economy shifts from ‘quite insignificant’ to ‘laughably trifling’. It was into that world that I stepped when I bought a bookshop in 2001, just four years after Amazon started selling cut-price books online. I now dream of my business making as much as even a laughably trifling dent in the global economy. In a further sign of appalling business acumen, I’m now responsible for this book, which attempts to bracket my customers unkindly into broad categories which will undoubtedly offend the very people on whom I depend for a living. This should surely seal my financial fate.
Roy Harley Lewis concludes in his preface that
one might ask why the bookseller should be any more interesting than the shoe salesman. Yet there can be few other careers that offer such satisfaction or that make such demands as the antiquarian-book trade, requiring the dealer to play at different times the roles of detective, scholar, agent, psychologist, and fortune-teller – quite apart from that of conventional buyer and salesman.
He may have a point. Or it may be that those of us who are singularly ill-equipped to deal with the stresses of normal life find ourselves drawn towards the business as a means of escaping from roles of the ‘conventional buyer and salesman’. This isn’t about us, though, the miserable, unfortunate few who have chosen to try to sell books to make a pitiful living. It is about our customers: those wretched creatures with whom we’re forced to interact on a daily basis, and who – as I write this under coronavirus lockdown – I miss like long-lost friends. From the charming and interesting to the rude and offensive, I miss them all. Apart from the fact that without them I have literally no income, to my enormous surprise I have discovered that I miss the human interaction. Yesterday, a man telephoned the shop and asked for a copy of my second book, Confessions of a Bookseller. The total, including postage, was £18. As I was taking down his credit card details, he said ‘Please add an extra £10.’ When I asked him why, he replied, ‘Because I know how hard this time must be for businesses like yours, and I want you to still be there when all of this is over, so that I can come and visit the shop again.’
Others have been equally kind; I recently received a cheque from someone I’ve never met who told me that she’d read an article in Time magazine, written by Margaret Atwood, in which she encouraged people to support small businesses during this difficult time. She asked for nothing other than that I cash the cheque. The kindness of strangers can reduce you to your knees in a sobbing mess faster than a well-aimed punch to the solar plexus. This is why I miss my customers. Despite my objection to many of them, beneath their hoary exteriors there beats a kind, human heart.
The ‘bookshops’ in the title of this book really only refers to my own shop. I have no wish to tarnish the reputations of others by claiming to speak on their behalf while venting my own spleen. No doubt those booksellers of a more generous disposition would paint far kinder portraits of their customers than those that follow this introduction, but these are drawn from my experiences over the past twenty years of suffering service in the trade, and I am unaware of any booksellers with a generous disposition – towards their customers, at least.
I ought also to apologise for perpetuating stereotypes, when in reality people are far more nuanced and exist in endless subtle shades of characteristics. Generalisations are unfair, but so is life. Suck it up.
For the purposes of convenience, and of causing further offence, I’ve attempted to adopt a sort of Linnaean system of taxonomy, which, now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve realised doesn’t really work.
1
Genus: Peritus (Expert)
If your knowledge of Latin is as woeful as mine, then you could be forgiven for assuming (as I did) that this refers to an unsavoury part of the nether regions. It does not. It means ‘expert’.
This kind of customer is – on the whole – a self-appointed expert who does not have the benefit of a regular audience on which to inflict his or her wisdom. Unlike most academics, or recognised industry commentators, who generally deal in fact-based, well-informed opinion, and who have groups of students and readers keen to hear what they have to say, most of the autodidactic types that follow have no such eager audience. As always, there are exceptions, and in their ranks can be counted some of the kindest customers I’m fortunate enough to encounter. The rest, though, are eye-wateringly tiresome.
There is nothing that the expert likes more than to use long words where short, simple language would suffice. Stamp-collecting becomes philately, looking at birds becomes ornithology and an unhealthy obsession with insects becomes entomology. It’s as though they’ve dined out and eaten Will Self for main course followed by Jonathan Meades and Stephen Fry for dessert. The difference being that Self and Meades and Fry have all swallowed, digested and understood the full Oxford English Dictionary and know precisely how to use the correct word in the right situation to bestow clarity upon their prose, while the expert takes excruciating pains to confound the reluctant listener for nothing more than the sake of obfuscation. They know fewer than five long words, but splash them around with wild abandon for no other purpose than to create the easily scratched veneer of intellectual superiority. But – as my pharmacist friend Cloda would say – hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism is no excuse to make someone feel foolish for not knowing that the chemical polyvinylpyrrolidone is a binding agent in most prescription tablets.
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway famously argued about the use of language, with Faulkner quipping that ‘Hemingway has never been kn
own to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary’. To which Hemingway replied ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think that big emotions come from big words? I know all the ten-dollar words as well as he does, but I prefer the older, simpler ones.’ My English teacher at school would have had a great deal more sympathy with Faulkner over Hemingway’s use of the word ‘ones’, arguing that there is no plural of the word ‘one’ other than ‘more than one’ or a higher number. He was also mercilessly pedantic about the word ‘alternative’, which he maintained had its root in the Latin word ‘alter’ meaning one of two. It was always a source of enormous pleasure in classes to suggest that there were two alternatives. Or possibly even more.
Type one
SPECIES: DOCTUS (SPECIALIST)
This is the kind of person who comes into the shop for no other reason than to lecture you about whatever their field of specialist interest is, and derives a singular pleasure when you know absolutely nothing about it, as you almost certainly won’t. Over the years, most specialist booksellers acquire considerable knowledge which reflects their stock, but when you have a general bookshop (like mine) it is impossible to know everything. Try telling that, though, to someone who has spent their entire adult life studying the reproductive habits of the Siberian tree snail. They will sneer at you with a supercilious look of undisguised delight and contempt (in equal measure) when you reveal that no, you haven’t heard of Michal Horsák’s seminal work on the subject, Mollusc Assemblages in Palaeoecological Reconstructions: An Investigation of Their Predictive Power Using Transfer Function Models. While they derive pleasure from your ignorance of their sphere of knowledge, they are incapable of really understanding why you – or everyone else, for that matter – wouldn’t want to spend twenty years living in a tent in a forest fifty miles from Omsk with a notebook and a microscope examining snail excrement, and reading nothing other than obscure academic papers on the subject.
The marginally more socially adept members of this species are conscious that other people might not share their obscure interests. This group derives an alternative sort of gratification from the fact that their niche obsession somehow differentiates them from other people, mistakenly assuming that it makes them more interesting. We used to have a regular customer who never failed to startle us by appearing at the counter without any obvious sign of having even entered the building, and cheerily announcing his prescence with the greeting ‘Hello! I’m a bit weird, me. I love reading books about differential calculus.’ The achingly obvious reality was that, in fact, he had no interest whatsoever in differential calculus but was so desperately dull that he thought that by telling people he had, it added a new dimension to his character. It didn’t. It should go without saying that anyone who introduces themselves as ‘a bit weird’ is almost certainly not.
Type two
SPECIES: HOMO ODIOSUS (BORE)
This type of person often considers him- or herself to be a polymath, and will inveterately share their thoughts with you on any subject you choose to mention, or accidentally mention, once you are aware of their proclivity. It is best to maintain complete silence when in their presence, as the slightest thing can trigger a lengthy tirade on the most unexpected of subjects, although often you don’t discover that customers fall into this taxonomic category until it’s far, far too late. They are not averse to listening in on conversations between other customers and interjecting with their (often wildly offensive) opinions, and on many occasions I have had to apologise to innocent bystanders who – having been quietly discussing something – have subsequently been subjected to an unsolicited (and possibly racist) rant from a complete stranger who happened to be within earshot.
We have one outstanding example of this type, and the dangers of not knowing how to deal with them are best illustrated by the following account of a day on which one of my friends offered to help in the shop.
My friend Robin appeared at eleven o’clock on a warm summer Saturday morning and took up his position behind the counter in the front of the shop. I was loitering around, pretending to work. After a couple of hours of the usual cut-and-thrust of daily bookshop life, the legendary local bore, Alfred,* came to the counter with three books. He thumped them down on the wooden surface with an air of serene smugness and, fixing Robin with his eye, announced portentously that they were ‘important books because they are responsible for the way things are now’.
Having suffered sufficiently long and painfully at Alfred’s hands over almost two decades I knew that the only safe response to any leading remark he may make is silence. Unfortunately, I had not had the chance to school Robin in this matter and beyond making frantic signals of negation behind Alfred’s back I could do nothing, but by a stroke of good fortune, he asked if he could leave the books on the counter while he went to get some cash from the bank’s ATM.
The moment he was out of earshot I warned Robin not to ask the question that Alfred had so obviously expected one of us to ask for fear of being on the receiving end of one of his interminable lectures on matters on which he considers himself to be an authority. Which is everything. ‘When he comes back to pay, don’t say anything that could be construed as an interest in what he has to say’ were my parting words before going upstairs to make a cup of tea, having given up on my frankly unconvincing attempt to create the illusion that I was doing something useful.
Twenty minutes later I was in the kitchen when a battle-weary Robin appeared. He explained that Alfred had returned shortly after I’d gone, but had been unable to get cash from the ATM, so – avoiding any mention of anything that might be mistaken for interest in Alfred or his books – Robin had suggested he pay with his contactless card. ‘That set him off. For the next fifteen minutes I had to listen to a paranoid monologue about cyber security. I honestly thought it might never end.’
I have yet to find a subject on which Alfred does not have a deeply unpalatable opinion, or a foreigner of whom he doesn’t have an irrational fear. Inevitably, his solution to his groundless xenophobia is heavy-handed state intervention, usually involving deportation or imprisonment for the crime of nothing more than failing to share Alfred’s views.
Type three
SPECIES: HOMO UTILIS (HELPFUL PERSON)
Not all experts are a nuisance, unless – of course – you’re Michael Gove. Sometimes they can be extremely useful. In January I received a telephone call from a woman in Dumfries who had been clearing out some of her library and was keen to sell some books. It was a cold, dark afternoon and when I arrived at her bungalow near the football ground I discovered boxes of books everywhere. It was an interesting and varied collection – her husband collected books about cricket, of which there were a couple of hundred, and she collected Beatrix Potter, Observer’s Books and Ladybirds – all good shop stock for me. As I was going through them, I picked up an unprepossessing paperback copy of Patricia Wentworth’s Lonesome Road, at which point she commented, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting book, it’s extremely rare and quite valuable.’ Looking at it, with its cover photo showing a box of chocolates with a syringe on top of it, I wouldn’t have said that it was either rare or valuable, but she explained: ‘Thorntons, the chocolate people, objected to the cover because they thought the association of their products with a syringe full of poison might damage their brand, so it was withdrawn and pulped, and another cover designed.’ This sort of information is priceless to a bookseller who needs – from time to time – to convince people that he knows what he’s talking about.
I have – or had until recently – a regular customer called Hamish. He died a few weeks before I finished writing this book. He was a retired actor, and had a passion for military history. He was a joy to talk to and never short of an interesting story. He knew his subject – the Second World War – as well as any academic, but never bored or pontificated about it. He would drop gems of fascinating information briefly into our short conversations, and always leave me wanting to know more. I will miss him greatly.
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Type four
SPECIES: HOMO QUI LIBROS ANTIQUOS COLLIGIT (ANTIQUARIAN BOOK COLLECTOR)
The antiquarian book collector is an altogether different breed, whose interest is usually in the book as an object, rather than the information it contains, although this is not exclusively the case; many with an interest in antiquarian books use them for academic or family history research. Antiquarian collectors invariably have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the means of identifying particular editions of the books from their chosen field. For example, collectors of early editions of the works of Robert Burns, particularly Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, will trawl the shelves of bookshops in search of the elusive Kilmarnock Edition, published by John Wilson of that town in 1786, armed with the knowledge that of the 612 subscription editions, only 84 are known to survive, and that they can be easily identified because Burns dedicated the book to Gavin Hamilton. They will be fully aware, too, that the second impression of the second edition (the Edinburgh Edition, of 1787, which is dedicated to ‘The Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt’ – Burns, the excise man, knew on which side his bannock was buttered) contains a further seventeen poems, and a misprint in ‘Address to a Haggis’ in which the Scots word ‘skinking’ (meaning ‘watery’) was incorrectly typeset as ‘stinking’. This error was perpetuated in the London Edition (also 1787), and such copies are known as the ‘Stinking Editions’. This sort of arcane knowledge may seem a bit obsessive, but that’s because it is, as tends to be characteristic of people who are passionate about a subject.
Another characteristic of the antiquarian subgroup of the Genus expert is the inevitable tutting about prices. Yes, it might be a signed, limited edition two-volume set of Ring of the Nibelung, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, priced at £600, but you can guarantee that the customer who’s pawing at it enviously will shake their head disapprovingly and tell you that they’ve seen it for sale considerably cheaper elsewhere. It seems odd that they’re looking at our copy so avariciously if this is the case. Tutting and telling booksellers that you’ve seen a cheaper copy is unlikely to result in a discount. We all know that sometimes we’ve overpaid, or that prices of particular books have fallen, but most of us are unlikely to drop a price and make a loss on a book on the word of a stranger who claims that they’ve seen a cheaper copy in another shop.