Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 381.45002 BYT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 381.45002 BYT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 381.45002 BYT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
One cozy, funny year with a Scottish used bookseller as he stays afloat while managing staff, customers, and life in the village of Wigtown. This endearing world is the next best thing to visiting your favorite bookstore (shop cat not included).
Inside a Georgian townhouse on the Wigtown highroad, jammed with more than 100,000 books and a portly cat named Captain, Shaun Bythell manages the daily ups and downs of running Scotland's largest used bookshop with a sharp eye and even sharper wit. His account of one year behind the counter is something no book lover should miss.
Shaun copes with eccentric staff, tallies up the day's orders, drives to distant houses to buy private libraries, and meditates on the nature of life and independent bookstores ( "There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you've been searching for, but with people too." ).
Confessions of a Bookseller is a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books. It's for any reader looking for the kind of friend you meet in a bookstore.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bythell follows up Diary of a Bookseller with an assortment of amusing and often cantankerous stories about a year in his life as the owner of a used bookstore in a Scottish village. The author painstakingly tracks sales, the number of customers who visit, and till totals for each day, punctuated by acerbic observations. There are the head-scratching requests ("I'm looking for a book but I can't remember the title. It's called The Red Balloon."), unexpectedly hilarious purchases (an elderly man buying a guide to wild sex), and the clueless ("It's a bookshop.... So does that mean that people can just borrow the books?"). Bythell's scathing commentary about customers drives much of his narrative, including a description of a woman wearing an unpleasant fragrance ("which I can only assume was manufactured as a particularly unpleasant neurotoxin by a North Korean biochemist in a secret bunker. Kim Jong Ill, indeed") as well as cheap customers asking for discounts or complaining about prices (" 'That's outrageous! Who would want to buy that?' Well, you for a start"). Bibliophiles will delight in, and occasionally wince at, these humorous anecdotes. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
A heart-warming love letter to books and bookshops, by an amenable fellow turned antisocial old misanthrope. "I was in here two years ago and you had a book by Roger Penrose. Do you know what happened to it?" Shaun Bythell - owner of the Book Shop in Wigtown, Galloway - has 100,000 books in stock, sells 20,000 a year, and has handled nearly 1m second-hand books since he bought the shop in 2001. Unsurprisingly, the Roger Penrose volume had not stuck in his mind. Before he entered the book trade at the tender age of 31, he was "amenable and friendly". Now, after many years of fielding bizarre questions, constant haggling over prices (why is it "acceptable to try to screw the profit out of struggling small businesses" but not supermarkets?), and struggling to survive despite Amazon's "icy grip" on bookselling, he has been forced to embrace the stereotype of the "impatient, intolerant, antisocial proprietor". In this brilliant sequel to The Diary of a Bookseller (2017), Bythell plays the misanthrope to perfection. For fans of his first book there are many familiar faces, including his part-time assistant, Nicky, a Jehovah's Witness who shelves Darwin's works in the fiction section and considers her boss "an impediment to the success of the business"; Anna, his Californian partner who helped set up the Open Book in the town, which people can hire for a fortnight to experience the joys of bookselling (it's apparently booked out for the next three years); and Captain the cat, who is "nudging the borderline of morbid obesity" and likes to leave dead birds around the shop. A new addition to Bythell's cast of colourful, not to say eccentric, characters is Emanuela, a 25-year-old Italian who comes to work in the shop in exchange for bed and board and who earns the nickname Granny by declaring: "I am 85 years old inside, like an old granny". Written as a diary, with daily customer tallies and till receipts (inevitably disappointing), Bythell's morose musings on the second-hand book trade, his disintegrating relationship with his partner ("I find it hard to see a future except as a cantankerous curmudgeon, living alone"), life in Wigtown and fishing in the local rivers ("it's the perfect antidote to everything") are wonderfully droll and often hilarious. It's the kind of authentic humour that has been honed by years of infuriatingly close contact with the great book-buying general public: "Massive row with a customer over whether Maigret was a fictional French detective (me) or a Belgian surrealist painter (them)". One day he overhears two women walking past his shop, saying: "There's no point going in there, it's just books." A lesser man might give up. But despite the gloomy picture he paints of bookselling, this is a delightfully heart-warming love letter to bookshops, one that celebrates their serendipity: the unexpected joy of coming across books you didn't know existed. And even as a locus of chance encounters: "Often customers - not locals - will bump into people they know from a totally different walk of life in the shop." As Flo - a student who occasionally helps in the shop ("the very embodiment of petulance") - writes on the blackboard outside: "Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy books (which is basically the same thing)."
Kirkus Review
A bookseller in Wigtown, Scotland, recounts a year in his life as a small-town dealer of secondhand books. "The pleasure derived from handling books that have introduced something of cultural or scientific significance to the world is undeniably the greatest luxury that this business affords," writes Bythell. In a diary that records his wry observations from behind the counter of his store, the author entertains readers with eccentric character portraits and stories of his life in the book trade. The colorful cast of characters includes bookshop regulars like Eric, the local orange-robed Buddhist; Captain, Bythell's "accursed cat"; "Sandy the tattooed pagan"; and "Mole-Man," a patron with a penchant for in-store "literary excavations." Bythell's employees are equally quirky. Nicky, the author's one paid worker, is an opinionated Jehovah's Witness who "consistently ignores my instructions" and criticizes her boss as "an impediment to the success of the business." His volunteer employee, an Italian college student named Emanuela (whom the author nicknamed Granny due to her endless complaints about bodily aches), came to Wigtown to move beyond the world of study and "expand [her] knowledge." Woven into stories about haggling with clients over prices or dealing with daily rounds of vague online customer requests--e.g., a query about a book from "around about 1951. Part of the story line is about a cart of apples being upset, that's all I know")--are more personal dramas, like the end of his marriage and the difficult realities of owning a store when "50 per cent [sic] of retail purchases are made online." For Bythell, managing technical glitches, contending with low profit margins on Amazon, and worrying about the future of his business are all part of a day's work. Irascibly droll and sometimes elegiac, this is an engaging account of bookstore life from the vanishing front lines of the brick-and-mortar retail industry. Bighearted, sobering, and humane. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Cold, grey day. Nicky appeared at 9.08 a.m., blaming the weather for her late arrival. The rain came on again at 10 a.m. and the sound of water dripping into buckets in the shop window began its usual symphony.
As I was filling the log basket, I heard a frog croak in the pond--the first one I've heard since last autumn.
On the way to the post office, I spotted Eric, the Wigtown Buddhist, in his orange robes--a welcome splash of colour on an otherwise grey day. I'm not sure when he moved here, but Wigtown has absorbed him with the amiable indifference it shows to everyone, no matter how incongruous they may appear in a small rural Scottish town.
Nicky spent the day re-arranging things that didn't need to be re-arranged.
After lunch I took down the Christmas decorations from the window displays. The left-hand window was still full of little puddles in places.
Today's blackboard:
Avoid social interaction:
always carry a book.
