The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, book review: Herein lies the book’s important message: support your local bookshop

The owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop, publishes his insightful diaries about bookselling

Shaun Bythell runs The Bookshop, Wigtown, Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop. The dream customer is the collector who buys £200 worth of illustrated poetry books. A good customer is someone who buys even a single book without attempting to haggle the price down. A bad customer doesn’t buy anything. And a really bad customer gets their laptop out and shamelessly checks the bookshop’s prices against those listed on Amazon. Then there are the customers who aren’t really customers – those waiting for the chemist up the road to fill their prescription, or for the garage to finish their car’s MOT.

Being a bookseller clearly requires the patience of a saint. Bythell does his best but has to take solace in highlighting his customers’ “stupid questions and rude comments,” which he famously details on the bookshop’s Facebook page. “Don’t say anything stupid,” he overhears one young woman warning her boyfriend, “or he’ll post it on Facebook.”

It’s anecdotes like these that account for much of the wry humour in these pages. The Australian woman, for example, who’s either asking for “Noddy books” or “naughty books”, he just can’t work out which; it’s only after he’s shown her the erotica section that it becomes clear she was looking for the Enid Blytons. Even the mail-order customers add to the hilarity; demands include Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants, A Drug Taker’s Notes and Incontinence. Then there are the regulars: “Bum Bag Dave”; Mr Deacon, who always comes in looking for a book reviewed in The Times, clipping of which in hand; and Sandy, the most tattooed man in Scotland, who exchanges walking sticks he’s made (which Bythell sells) for store credit.

There’s also Nicky, Bythell’s right-hand woman; or more accurately, she would be if she ever actually did anything he asks her to do. She “works” in the shop (ie is rude to him and ignores his instructions) twice a week, only eats past its sell-by date food she’s found in the skip behind the local supermarket, and wears a ski-suit for half the year. I could go on, but you get the picture. She comes out with gems like, “Do you want my fridge? I am getting rid of everything that runs on electricity.”

The “Love, Nina meets Black Books” tagline certainly captures the spirit of the narrative, but Bythell’s telling us more than just funny stories. There are some lovely tales about individual books – that Bythell knows the provenance of a particular two-volume edition of Boccaccio’s The Decameron (originally brought to Scotland by an Italian immigrant in the 1920s, who went on to run a hugely successful local café) is information you won’t get on Amazon.

Herein lies the book’s important message: support your local bookshop. They desperately need the help, and the world will be a much poorer place if we lose them. Also worth doing: sign up for The Bookshop’s Random Book Club: only £59 a year and you’ll received a surprise book a month, “from a rare first edition to a history of underwear”.

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell is published by Profile (£14.99)