Return of the Bookseller Diarist by Shaun Bythell review: 'laugh-out-loud funny'

Shaun Bythell | Contributed

This is the third volume of diaries from Shaun Bythell, the owner of Scotland’s largest second hand bookshop – called, with a glorious lack of imagination, “The Bookshop” – in Wigtown, and a kind of nexus in the town’s successful Book Festival. I should say at the outset that Shaun is a friend. It is, moreover, rather peculiar to be reviewing a book in which I appear, albeit as a minor character. I don’t actually remember one incident (Thursday 22 August, 2019) where Shaun writes “Review of Confessions [the second book after the original Diary of a Bookseller] in The Scotsman by Stuart Kelly. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything with such trepidation. Fortunately, he spared the rod. He once told a writer who complained that he had never reviewed any of her books that ‘my silence is a mercy’.” It certainly sounds like the kind of pompous pronouncement I might have come out with, but it hasn’t cleaved to my memory. I do clearly recollect the fulsome and well-deserved appreciation of my Moroccan chicken casserole, although technically it was a tagine.

We begin with an apology: “Some of the more critical reviews of my diaries mention that they are repetitive. Well, yes. They’re diaries. Repetition is inevitable when you’re writing about the working day, week after week, year after year”. He quotes PG Wodehouse – who occurs frequently – and a rather more esoteric tome, Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (1924) and the delightful sentiment “It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology for its shortcomings”. Bythell need not make such an apology but it is entirely in keeping with the self-deprecating wit throughout.

This book does differ from its predecessors. It covers three and a bit years from 2017 to 2020, and there are changes in his life that it would spoil the book to reveal. It is interpolated with sections from another curio, a privately printed volume of 1792 entitled Memoirs of The First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, the present Bookseller in Chiswell-Street, Moorfields, London, Written by Himself and dedicated to the public and to “respectable” and “sordid” booksellers. These are surprisingly revealing. Lackington was shunned for his policy of bulk-buying and heavily undercutting the competition – a very similar strategy to the major online bookseller of our times, though Bythell does note, with slightly caustic irony, books only make up 5 per cent of their trade these days. He still gives the daily tally of the number of customers and the till takings; and some of the characters from the previous books return – the significant ex Anna, “Bum-bag Dave”, Sandy the tattooed pagan, and “Eliot”, the soubriquet he gives to the director of the Wigtown Book Festival.

But the major difference is that with this book, Bythell is not just a bookseller but a published author. The original diary was a bestseller, and much of the new volume deals with the obligations for publicity that this demands. In some ways it can seem very glamourous, with trips to New Zealand and Italy and America as well as local book festivals. He certainly is not ungrateful, but the extent of the gadding around is clearly wearisome as well. Authors are never really told that they might become bored with the sound of their own voices. It is exacerbated by Bythell’s rather extreme nerves about public speaking – and he is not joking about this. That said, I’ve seen a great many authors whom you might think were utterly unfazed by performance looking ashen and sweaty and tearful almost until the moment the stage lights go down.

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What sets these books apart is the fact that Bythell can write. Almost immediately, having informed the reader of tearing up old sheets to clean leather bindings, he says “Hung the book cleaning rags on the drying rail in the kitchen. Even after a wash, they were still stained brown from the tannins in the leather. It looks like the clothes lines outside the latrine of the Roman garrison forts of Hadrian’s Wall”. And, of course, the encounters with customers are laugh-out-loud funny, even the exasperation at “Instacustomers: the algorithmic execrable spawn of Instagram and Twitter whose barometer of success in life is measured by the number of likes their photographs acquire”. There is a constant stream of hagglers and grifters, and utterly surreal enquiries. I was particularly taken by the woman wondering why Bythell doesn’t sell green candles, or the person who phoned asking “are your books gold or platinum plated? Their being so might explain the deranged prices you ask”.

Covid provides the closure, in more ways than one; and various storms further hamper the business. But despite it all, Bythell keeps his charm: “I was 30, drifting fairly aimlessly when I fell into bookselling… but there hasn’t been a single moment in the past 17 years where I have doubted my decision… I will never be rich, but that was never an aspiration. I have found a degree of contentment which almost seems to defy the word ‘word’.” Hopefully there will be more volumes to come. Or I might have to write my own and draw back the veil from some notable omissions...

Return of the Bookseller Diarist, by Shaun Bythell, New Modern Arcade, £25

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