The Diary of a Bookseller Quotes

“I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Prefacing a sentence with 'I don't want to appear rude, but...' flags up the same alarm bells as 'I am not racist, but...' It's quite simple: if you don't want to appear rude, don't be rude. If you're not a racist, don't behave like a racist.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“At 10 a.m. the first customer came throught the door: 'I'm not really interested in books' followed by 'Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.' By 10.30 a.m. the will to live was but a distant memory.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The shop was quiet until about 11.30 a.m., when a few people began to trickle in. After lunch a teenage girl – who had been sitting by the fire reading for an hour – brought three Agatha Christie paperbacks to the counter; the total came to £8. She offered me a limp fiver and said, ‘Can I have them for £5?’ I refused, telling her that the postage on Amazon alone would come to £7.40. She wandered off muttering about getting them from the library. Good luck with that: Wigtown library is full of computers and DVDs and not a lot of books”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“A customer at 11.15 a.m. asked for a copy of Far from the Maddening Crowd. In spite of several attempts to explain that the book's title is actually Far from the Madding Crowd, he resolutely refused to accept that this was the case, even when the overwhelming evidence of a copy of it was placed on the counter under this nose: 'Well, the printers have got that wrong.' Despite the infuriating nature of this exchange, I ought to be grateful: he has given me an idea for the title of my autobiography should I ever be fortunate enough to retire.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 booksneatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be riffling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extroidinary.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down - as if for confirmation of this - then looked back at me and said, 'A dead bird can't fall out of it's nest', and left the shop fly still agape.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Shortly afterwards, a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he'd borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“У книгарні тисячі книжок всіх кольорів і відтінків. Кожна обкладинка — це двері на магічних завісах”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Я назбирав цілу гору книжок, у які поринав, тікаючи від світу навколо й усередині мене.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“the immersive capacity of a good novel to transport you into a different world is unique to the written word.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Все эти издательства и люди, стоящие за ними, не боялись идти на риск и делились с миром новыми идеями. У каждого был собственный отличительный стиль, начиная с тематики и заканчивая дизайном, типографикой и представлениями о том, какой должна быть книга.”
― Шон Байтелл, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Today’s post brought four more anonymous postcards, including one quoting from The Meaning of Liff, a book in which Douglas Adams and John Lloyd took an assortment of British place-names and ascribed them meanings, as though in a dictionary. One”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Started reading The Restraint of Beasts.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“stench of Brut 33 for a while. I asked Nicky if she had seen him recently, to which she nonchalantly replied, ‘Did you not hear?”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Philately will get you nowhere in The Book Shop.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The Tinkler-Gypsies is a book written by a lawyer from Newton Stewart called Andrew McCormick in 1906. It is a detailed account of the Galloway traveller community at”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“called Donald McLeod’s Gloomy Memories, published in 1892, to”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Ronnie the electrician turned up when the shop was full of customers and started loudly describing the various ways in which we could blow up Kindles”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The Guardian published ‘Weird and wonderful bookshops worldwide’; we are number 3 again. I’m not sure if these things go in cycles, or whether bookshops are suddenly becoming fashionable places. Perhaps it is the hipster movement driving the trend to be seen with vinyl and real books instead of iPods and Kindles.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The missing book from today’s orders was yet another one that we had failed to delist before sending our old warehouse stock to Ian.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Lunched with two Italian women – journalists who were over because they had read Anna’s book and wanted to visit Wigtown. I am quite convinced that Rockets has done far more for tourism in Wigtown than Visit Scotland ever will.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Online orders: 1 Books found: 0”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“FRIDAY, 2 JANUARY Online orders: 7 Books found: 4”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Bookshops are now scarce, and stock is plentiful. It is a buyer’s market. Even when things were good back in 2001 – the year I bought the shop – the previous owner valued the stock of 100,000 books at £30,000.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Perhaps I ought to have advised the man on the telephone to read (along with Orwell’s ‘Bookshop Memories’) William Y. Darling’s extraordinary The Bankrupt Bookseller Speaks Again before he committed to buying the shop. Both are works that aspirant booksellers would be well advised to read.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Beyond this, I know nothing about him, not even his first name. In fact, I often wonder why he orders books through me when he could so easily do so on Amazon. Perhaps he does not own a computer. Perhaps he does not want one. Or perhaps he is one of the dying breed who understand that, if they want bookshops to survive, they have to support them.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller