Confessions of a Bookseller
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Irreverently funny ... kept me giggling all week.' Scotland on Sunday
"Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?"
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms.
Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bythell follows up Diary of a Bookseller with an assortment of amusing and often cantankerous stories about a year in his life as the owner of a used bookstore in a Scottish village. The author painstakingly tracks sales, the number of customers who visit, and till totals for each day, punctuated by acerbic observations. There are the head-scratching requests ("I'm looking for a book but I can't remember the title. It's called The Red Balloon."), unexpectedly hilarious purchases (an elderly man buying a guide to wild sex), and the clueless ("It's a bookshop.... So does that mean that people can just borrow the books?"). Bythell's scathing commentary about customers drives much of his narrative, including a description of a woman wearing an unpleasant fragrance ("which I can only assume was manufactured as a particularly unpleasant neurotoxin by a North Korean biochemist in a secret bunker. Kim Jong Ill, indeed") as well as cheap customers asking for discounts or complaining about prices (" That's outrageous! Who would want to buy that?' Well, you for a start"). Bibliophiles will delight in, and occasionally wince at, these humorous anecdotes.
Customer Reviews
The Confessions of a Bookseller
For bookworms this is a sheer delight, but also a sobering account of the trials and tribulations of keeping afloat in an increasingly cut-throat world of multinational organizations who are, not to put too fine a point on it, rapacious philistines.