About The Bookshop
My journey through books continues in its usual random manner and this time I've ended up in a bookshop, and not just any bookshop but The Bookshop.
I first came across it because of yet another book recommendation and again I can't remember now where that came from (I must start writing this down) but someone recommended Shaun Bythell's "Diary of a Bookseller" to me.
Shaun owns The Bookshop and he claims it's the largest second hand book shop in Scotland, with over a mile of shelving supporting roughly 100,000 books.
It's located in Wigtown which is Scotland's answer to Hay-on-Wye, having declared itself as Scotland’s National Book Town in 1998, and this one small town now has fifteen bookshops to explore. It also holds the Wigtown Book Festival at the end of September each year.
The book is the diary of a year of Shaun's life, including the festival in which he's heavily involved, and is set in 2014. What makes it a good read is first that he is a something of character in himself as are some of his regulars, both customers and staff. He also reveals a lot about the nitty gritty of owning and running a bookshop, and about buying and selling books.
Certainly one thing I realised from reading about his buying trips is that the vast majority of my increasingly out of hand collection of books is probably worth very little on the second hand market.
In passing he also recommends books he's reading, which in turn has lead to me buy yet more books, and his comments about fiction vs non-fiction has finally made me realise that with the passing of the years I'm now finding more pleasure in non-fiction than fiction.
The other thing I discovered is that during a lean period some years before the book was written he invented the Random Book Club. The premise is that you sign up for a year (currently at a cost of £69) and each month Shaun sends you a book he has selected (this is a slight over-simplification, as the his book reveals sometimes his staff pick some of the books). The books are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, paperback and hardback, with the weight being towards non-fiction.
Back in 2014 he had about 150 subscribers and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Club is still going today. I think this deserves its own post as I'm now a subscriber and have so far received three books so I'll come back to that in a later post.
He has since written "Confessions of a Bookseller", which I've also bought and read and covers 2015, and there's currently two more available: "Remainders of the Day", which is a diary of yet another year, and "Seven Kinds of People you find in Bookshops" which appears to be more of a general work as suggested by the title. A fifth volume, "Return of the Bookseller Diarist", is due out of 8th October.
The added icing on the cake is that there is another book related to this story: "Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets" by Jessica A. Fox which is now out of print but I found a copy. (I believe it's back in print as "Wigtown: A True Bookshop Love Story", but I prefer the original title.)
Jessica was Shaun's girlfriend back in 2014. It was written before Shaun's books and it tells the story of how they became a couple in 2008. It's very sweet. In his own books Shaun refers to her as Anna and I'm not entirely sure which of these is a pseudonym, but perhaps the latter as by the end of the first book they've split up, but they remain friends and she features in the second diary too.
Anyway I should really visit Wigtown, perhaps at festival time although it's not ideally timed for me. It's also logistically "interesting" as it's not got a station and Google Maps claims it's typically about ten hours away from Nairn by a baroque mix of trains, buses, and walking. Oh well, I do like to travel.
