There’s a moment in the first season of the short-lived but influential sitcom Black Books in which an elderly customer appears with a box of attractive old editions of classics to sell to Dylan Moran’s crosspatch bookseller Bernard. Barely looking at them, Bernard offers him £40. But they’re worth more than that, the man says. “I know, I know,” Bernard concedes. “But I don’t want them. I’ll have to price them, then, and put them up on the shelves, and store them, and people will come in and ask about them, and buy them, and read them, and come back and sell them and the whole hideous cycle will just go on and on and on ...” He gives the man £40 to take the books away.
Shaun Bythell’s dispatches from the Wigtown Bookshop, which he has run for nearly 20 years, read like a knowing riff on the persona of Bernard Black. He started out grousing about his life, pillorying his eccentric staff and venting about his noisome customers on a Facebook page. Then he did the same in his hit Diary of a Bookseller, continued with Confessions of a Bookseller, and here he is – an actual franchise – with a slim little listicle-titled till-point follow-up for the Christmas market. His inner Bernard Black will be heaving a world-weary sigh. The more he parades his contemptus mundi, the more the world loves him.
The gimmick for this one is that, rather than allow his gallery of human specimens to emerge one by one through the pages of his diaries, like some sort of bookshop safari, he is offering a Linnaean classification of types. As he somewhat apologetically notes from time to time: “I’ve touched on this species in previous books, as with most of the others.” Still, it’s crisp and often funny – and Bythell is canny enough to temper his pantomime misanthropy with bursts of sweetness towards, among others, self-published local historians.
He identifies seven genuses of bookshop pest: Peritus (The Expert), Familia Juvenis (Young Family), Homo qui maleficas amat (Occultist), Senex cum barba (Bearded Pensioner), Viator non tacitus (The Not-So-Silent Traveller) and Parentum historiae studiosus (Family Historian). These are each subdivided into a handful of variant types – so the occultists include Aleister Crowley nuts who insist on spelling it “magik”, people interested in conjuring tricks, David Icke-ish conspiracy-theory types, tarot readers, ghost hunters and (oddly) handicraft enthusiasts – apparently on the grounds that they share a wardrobe with the tarot types.
It was George Orwell, quoted in Bythell’s first book, who observed of his own experience of bookselling that “many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop”. And so it seems to be to this day.
Here you’ll find much steam enjoyably vented over customers who whistle tunelessly, sniff incessantly, expect booksellers to babysit their children, haggle obnoxiously (apparently asking for a bulk discount when you buy two books is a thing), talk to booksellers in order to show off their knowledge of some arcane area of publishing rather than to buy books, swap dust wrappers on books so they can “browse” the erotica undetected, or drop silent beefy farts in the travel section.
Did the title say “seven”? Bythell throws in a bonus category at the end – Operarii (Staff) – saying that he should perhaps have called the book Eight Types of People You Find in Bookshops but “it’s all a bit too late now – the press release has gone out – so what follows is a fudge”. Do you believe him? Me neither. But, y’know, it’s all part of the shtick. It allows him to drop in a line of self-deprecation too. Hence Venditor librorum antiquorum (Secondhand Bookseller): “Ancient, crumbling and often drunk or hungover, the secondhand bookseller is self-employed for no other reason than that they have no choice. Nobody in their right mind would ever give a job to someone so completely devoid of even the most rudimentary social skills that even a Neanderthal outcast would look like Jay Gatsby in their company.”
And yet, with a heart of gold. A postscript brings the tally up to nine with a description of Cliens perfectus (Perfect Customer). Among the subtypes in this vanishingly small contingent are the ingenuously passionate readers whom Bythell prizes above the misers, time wasters and poseurs. He has nothing but love for the collectors of books about steam locomotives, rare editions of modern fiction, and – in their uniform of black T-shirt and white trainers – science-fiction fans.
He ends in the spirit of the closing couplet of The Tempest. “Without lovers of books, I would have no business, so I should conclude with an apology ... ” And he concludes by quoting, as Venditor librorum antiquorum might, from a half-forgotten book about books.
• Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops is published by Profile (£7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
