Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

by Shaun Bythell

  This species has a special status in the genus because – apart from the horrors of Lycra leaving very little by way of anatomical detail to the imagination – the Lycra-clad manages to slow traffic to an agonising grind with both the camper van AND bicycles, which it mounts on the back of the vehicle, with the sole purpose of frustrating anything stuck behind it. Before embarking on a cycle ride, the Lycra-clad bearded pensioner will depart from its overnight destination and drive to any free car park where it will leave its oversized vehicle occupying at least four or, if judiciously parked, five parking spaces. From this vantage point the bicycles are removed from the back of the vehicle, and much fuss is made putting on helmets, adjusting straps, fiddling with panniers, checking laces etc. This inevitably involves bending over and other such movements which test the elasticity of the Lycra to its very limits, before – finally – the bikes are mounted and the journey begins. In total, the cycling part of the day cannot be longer than five miles, but it must not take less than five hours.

  The almost impossible physical feat of averaging a speed of 1 m.p.h. on a bicycle is achieved by breaking the journey with a stop in a bookshop. During this break, the Lycra-clad pair (and it usually is a couple) will head straight to the Ordnance Survey map section, and – standing in the most inconvenient part of the shop (ideally blocking a door or passageway) – unfold every map to plot their routes for the rest of the week, before folding the maps back up the wrong way, almost certainly tearing them in at least three places. The maps are then returned to the wrong section of the map display unit, before the Lycra-clad duo leave the shop without so much as a word to the staff. Once they’ve gone through the obligatory ritual of checking straps, laces etc. once more, there invariably follows a public argument, with each of them pointing their outstretched arms, fingers indignant, in different directions before they set off once more. Routes are specifically chosen for their high volume of traffic, combined with complete lack of overtaking opportunities for vehicles unfortunate enough to be stuck behind them, resulting in satisfying tailbacks that can be seen from space, and which often make headlines in the local news. Once back at their motor home, they’ll fire-up the ‘Swift Avenger’ and potter onwards to find somewhere nice for the night, ideally spoiling someone’s view, and with a nice, clean stream into which they can empty the toxic contents of the chemical toilet the following morning.

  Type two

  SPECIES: BRACAS RUBRAS GERENS (PANTALONS ROUGES)

  In yet another blatant failure of my Linnaean classification system, I am forced to concede that this species does not, in fact, have a beard. The pantalon rouge is nearly always clean-shaven. In the case of the males, it’s usually because they’ve been in the army (officers) or passed through some sort of institution in which facial hair is not tolerated. It is not mandatory that the trousers in question are made of corduroy, but in most cases they are. It helps if they’re slightly ill-fitting too, ideally a couple of inches too short, fully exposing the recently polished brogues. Within the male group of pantalon rouge there is a requirement to be either substantially overweight or very tall and lean. They are all aged over fifty-five, and have children who are stockbrokers or who are married to stockbrokers.

  There is nothing casual or meandering about this species. They are not browsers. They know exactly what they want (usually military or family history, hunting or heraldry) and approach their quest for books with an alarming determination. They never check to see how much a book costs when they find it, and never flinch when you tell them how much it is, even when it’s eye-wateringly expensive. With the exception of their squaddies, they have never knowingly encountered another human being who is not a fellow pantalon rouge, and as such, speak to one another as though everyone else in the room is also one. This has resulted in some quite awkward situations in my shop, as only a very small percentage of my customers are pantalons rouges. Members of this species are rapacious carnivores, and while they have a slight understanding of the concept of vegetarianism (nephew’s girlfriend is one), it tends to be limited to the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian ‘and look how he turned out!’ Most male pantalons rouges are firmly of the conviction that ‘Vegan’ is one of Jupiter’s moons. No member of this species is complete without at least one labrador, preferably a black one and ideally named after a historical figure, or any object connected with the armed forces. Panzer, for example, would be perfect. Or Mauser. Actually, thinking about it, the Germans have cornered the market in this area. You’re not really going to call a dog Gatling Gun or Lee-Enfield, are you, although you might get away with Winston or Monty.

  The female of this species can be roughly divided into two types: indoors and outdoors. Both are utterly terrifying. Neither generally wears pantalon rouge, but there is unquestionably a uniform. I’m not sufficiently au fait with it to know who makes it, but they must have made a fortune out of it as it appears to be a mandatory sartorial requirement. It’s a sort of green tartan waistcoat, made from the hardiest of tweed. It looks like the sort of thing that’s tough enough to drag through a hedge backwards without damaging a single stitch. It is invariably accompanied by a waxed jacket (Barbour). The outdoor female pantalon rouge wears, without exception, trousers that she has almost certainly knitted herself with the wool from the pelt of a long extinct species of mammal which has been hanging on the wall of her ancestral home for several hundred years; they are sufficiently coarse that they could comfortably exfoliate a rhinoceros. Every item of her clothing is of a colour that might have been designed with no other purpose than to disguise mud, a material of which she maintains a permanent film. She has practical hair, which she cuts herself. She has one – and only one – feature in common with the tarot reader, and that is that her clothes are covered by a layer of animal hair, but in her case it is usually a mix from several pets and a variety of livestock. No weather, no matter how foul, will prevent her from walking the dogs, which she will boot out of the house if they show the slightest reluctance to be taken for a walk. She is a keen shot, rides horses and will happily skin rabbits and pluck pheasants, and these things are reflected in her literary interests when she comes into the shop. She marches towards the counter with a look in her eye that makes you want to hide, and barks one of the following words: ‘Dogs’, ‘Cookery’ or ‘Hunting’. By ‘Dogs’ she means books about training gun dogs. By ‘Cookery’ she means exclusively books about game cookery. By ‘Hunting’ she means books written before the hunting ban.

  The indoor type of this species is normally of a more fragile build, and takes care of her appearance, but not in an obvious way. Haircuts are in London because ‘you can spot a provincial haircut a mile away’. She wouldn’t go near a horse, but she loves horse-racing, and her clothes are cut from an infinitely less coarse cloth than her sister, the outdoor type, with whom she gets on despite their enormous differences in personality. This is for no other reason than that they are both pantalons rouges. She would never dream of taking the dog for a walk, and her interests, when she comes into the bookshop and wafts dreamily around, are a light touch of Bloomsbury (particularly Virginia Woolf) with a smattering of the Mitford sisters. She would love her grandchildren to read Beatrix Potter and Helen Bannerman, but instead they ‘insist on reading that dreadful David Walliams’. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the fact that she keeps my children’s section ticking over with her unappreciated gifts to them.

  The pantalons rouges will treat staff in a book-shop with a confusing combination of absolute politeness and utter and complete disdain. It is possibly the most disarming of customers you will ever encounter in the trade, filling you with both a comforting warmth and unbridled fury.

  Type three

  SPECIES: QUI IN PARVAM DOMUM MOVERUNT (DOWNSIZERS)

  This is not a species you’ll find in shops that sell new books, but they appear on a daily basis in second-hand bookshops, trying to convince you that their tatty old Reader’s Digest Book of the Car is worth a fortune, or that thei
r Miller’s Antiques Prices Guide for 1978 is a really significant milestone in English literature. Because property is relatively cheap in this part of Scotland, a considerable number of people move here after retirement, cashing in their equity from places where house prices are higher. This brings with it its own problems, such as pressure on the healthcare system and lack of housing for younger people, but it also brings benefits – our book festival relies heavily on volunteers, and this pool of retirees is a large one, whose occupants have useful skills. Retired lawyers and accountants are snapped up extremely quickly. It also means that – in most cases – people are moving into smaller homes and having to divest themselves of some of their possessions. It comes as no great surprise that, when they’re getting rid of books, they choose to keep those they enjoyed the most, which inevitably means that they attempt to dump the things they don’t want (or need) on us. Occasionally something interesting will come in, but it is astonishing how often people optimistically bring in copies of The Good Pub Guide 1988, unbound copies of National Geographic magazine, The Good News Bible, The Friendship Book of Francis Gay or People’s Friend Annuals, expecting huge sums of money for books which are all, by any measure, completely worthless.

  Downsizers are easy to spot because they’ve usually downsized their cars too, and replaced the old VW estate with something new but considerably smaller. If you see a bearded pensioner lifting a banana box full of books from the boot of a brand-new red Nissan Micra and heading your way, the smart money will tell you that you’ll hear the word ‘downsizing’ in the next thirty seconds. There’s something that is both exultant and tragic about down-sizers – they’re happy because they’ve retired, they have time and money, and they’ve moved to a place they clearly love. But tragic because they’re getting rid of things which obviously meant something to them once. Their children have left home, and they are – to use one of my mother’s favourite phrases since she turned seventy-five – ‘in the minefield now’, and the place they’ve downsized to will probably be the place in which they die.

  Type four

  SPECIES: AVARUS (MISER)

  Once again, this might be a type which is peculiar to the second-hand bookshop, and of whose existence the vendor of new books may well be blissfully ignorant. I hope they remain so. Misers are not just mean: they’re really mean. They are not exclusively pensioners, but even those of a significantly younger vintage who fall into this category have a whiff of mothballs and freshly pressed grey flannel about them which might prematurely catapult them into the bearded pensioner category. Everyone in the second-hand book trade will have come across the customer who thinks that buying two books is ‘bulk buying’. For the miser, the concept of inflation is incomprehensible, despite the fact that they’re fully cognisant of the value of their house having trebled since they bought it in 1992. A mint-condition third edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, from 1726, priced at £6,000, is enough to fire them into an incandescent rage because its original price was a groat. The bookseller will be accused of all manner of indecency for demanding more than that original groat for this ‘old book’ and be vilified for – as was so perfectly expressed by Bernard Black in Black Books – ‘naked profiteering’.

  I have a couple of customers who fall into this category, but who somehow manage to avoid the confrontational aspect of it. They’re clearly married, because the moment they enter the shop they split up and avoid one another for at least an hour while they ferret away, but when they come to the counter they will each have found at least five books in the shop which have been there since 1970, and which nobody has bothered to change the price of since then. These are books which ought to be £20 each, but which – by virtue of idleness on my part, combined with the fact that we have 100,000 books in the shop – have remained priced at £1. I have no idea how they hunt them out, but they do so with such determination – like pigs hunting for truffles every time they visit – that I feel that I should probably offer them each a job. They’re both in their sixties. He has a very thin moustache of the type that George Orwell had in his most ill-advised whiskered days. Hers is far more luxuriant, and one which – if I owned a comb – I would find it impossible to resist the urge to lean over the counter and remove the crumbs of yesterday’s breakfast from while she reluctantly opens her dusty purse and seeks through her few remaining groats for payment. They don’t haggle because they know that they’ve already found bargains, but the transaction is still an unpleasant one for me, because we all know that they’ve come away considerably the better from it.

  6

  Genus: Viator non tacitus (The Not-So-Silent Traveller)

  Chiang Yee, a Chinese man born in Jiujiang in 1903, wrote and illustrated a beautiful series of books under the nom de plume ‘The Silent Traveller’. The first of these was The Silent Traveller in London (actually, it was preceded by The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland, but the London book set the benchmark for the subsequent series). Yee’s appeal was based on his unusual way of looking at the world. He interpreted the everyday with a ‘positive curiosity’: he was acutely aware that even the most mundane of activities – from washing clothes to walking dogs – could become a subject of bewildering fascination when observed through the eyes of a stranger who lacks the benefit of familiar cultural reference points. Robert Burns – as so often – appears to have been prescient. A hundred and sixty-two years prior to the publication of Chiang Yee’s The Silent Traveller in Edinburgh (Methuen, 1948), Burns wrote the following words in ‘To a Louse’:

  O wad some Power the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as ithers see us!

  When copies of Yee’s books come into the shop, I often wonder if he’d read Burns and was aware that the poem was inspired by the experience of sitting behind a well-respected member of the congregation in a damp Scottish church who was oblivious to the fact that her hair was infested with lice. I hope so, but either way, the gaze of strangers cannot but help illuminate the strangeness of our own habits. Yee managed to accomplish this by quiet observation. The customers you’re about to encounter are not at all like that. While Yee liked to pass unnoticed, members of this species appear to go to considerable lengths to draw attention to themselves. I don’t believe this is always conscious – possibly, like a nervous tic, it is the reverse – but it is always extremely annoying.

  Type one

  SPECIES: STRIDENS (WHISTLER)

  Sadly this type has nothing to do with the artist who immortalised his mother on canvas, but is a man (it is always a man) who is so blissfully ignorant of the fact that this habit can be deeply irritating, particularly when it is completely tuneless (it is always tuneless), that he fails to notice quite how much the people around him dislike it. I suspect that it is something peculiar to bookshops – you rarely hear people whistling on trains, or in the supermarket. Or anywhere else, really. Most often, it is an inadvertent act of social incompetence committed by people who aren’t really interested in buying books and who are wandering aimlessly around the shop, and who – for some reason – have decided that whistling will make the whole experience more enjoyable both for them and for other customers. It must be an unconscious, nervous thing but – bloody hell – I wish they’d stop. Even the most withering of stares fails to have the slightest impact on their rendition of whatever it is they think that they’re whistling. Occasionally you’ll catch a few accidental notes in a row which you imagine you recognise, and think ‘Oh, Mahler’s 8th Symphony’ or ‘Ah, a Bond film theme tune’, but one note later you’ll be proved wrong, and realise that there is nothing even remotely musical about the whistler’s wind solo. If subjected to sonic analysis, I suspect that the whistler’s outpourings might bear some resemblance to the mathematical concept of π – the number which never repeats itself. The whistler’s dull, infuriating notes have probably – inadvertently – created the kind of work for which the avant-garde musical genius John Cage might happily have sacrificed a limb.


  Type two

  SPECIES: STERNUENS (SNIFFER)

  Of all the types in this book, this is by far the one I most want to grab by the shoulders and shake. I don’t – and never will – understand why some people, when afflicted by a cold, choose to sniff every three seconds rather than blow their noses. A surprising number of the people who fall into this category appear to wear anoraks. I suspect that they live in tents in their parents’ gardens. Their fields of interest are varied, and you’re as likely to find their snotty snouts dribbling onto the pages of an Agatha Christie novel as a copy of Thomas Hayes’s 1786 (Dublin) edition of A Serious Address on the Consequences of Ignoring Common Coughs and Colds. The sniffer is blissfully unaware that his (for, again, it is almost always a man) noisy metronomic nasal inhalations are both unpleasant and irritating, and will wander through the shop, or stand at his chosen section looking at books, wetly sniffing every three seconds. The timing is so precise that it is uncanny. The temptation to thrust a tissue into their limp, clammy hand is almost overwhelming, but it would be a futile exercise, as I know from bitter experience. Once, on the train from Dumfries to Carlisle, I offered to buy the snivelling man in the seat behind me a packet of tissues, and was met with a glare of such aggressive indignation that I might as well have suggested that his parents were siblings. Which I suspect they may well have been.

  Type three

  SPECIES: SUSURRANS (HUMMER)

  You could be forgiven for thinking that this is pretty much the same as the whistler, but it isn’t. There are some fundamental differences, chief among which is that the hummer normally has the decency to make some attempt at sticking to a recognisable tune. While the whistler generates a series of notes that would confound the most complex of random number generators, the hummer prides him- (or her-)self on musical fidelity. The tune is, admittedly, usually something dreadful (think Take That, or Cliff Richard) but it is nonetheless a recognisable series of notes. That, though, does not make it any less annoying.