Just a friendly reminder, folks.

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2019)

FRIDAY, 6 MARCH

Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2

Nicky in. She has hijacked the shop’s Facebook page again and left this typically bewildering post:

Good morning everyone!
With a song in my heart, I skip in to work only to be berated for buying books off a customer for £45, whereas the BGC would have paid £175. Happy customer, happy me, disgruntled tube, sorry, I meant to say ‘boss’.

BGC is Nicky’s current nickname for me, and stands for Big Ginger Conundrum. ‘Tube’, for the uninitiated, is a Scottish insult, the politest interpretation of it being ‘idiot’.”

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2017)

FEBRUARY

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole – in spite of my employer’s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop – no.

George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’, London, November 1936

Orwell’s reluctance to commit to bookselling is understandable. There is a stereotype of the impatient, intolerant, antisocial proprietor – played so perfectly by Dylan Moran in Black Books – and it seems (on the whole) to be true. There are exceptions of course, and many booksellers do not conform to this type. Sadly, I do. It was not always thus, though, and before buying the shop I recall being quite amenable and friendly. The constant barrage of dull questions, the parlous finances of the business, the incessant arguments with staff and the unending, exhausting, haggling customers have reduced me to this. Would I change any of it? No.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky (New York Review Books 2015)

What Chimen did do, though, was pen a series of memoranda about how he had acquired some of his rarest prizes. He wrote, for example, about how, in the early 1950s, he had managed to buy William Morris’s complete collection of the Socialist League’s journal, The Commonweal, along with the wooden box, with a rexine cover dyed blue and lined with a white felt like material, that Morris himself had constructed to house a 1539 Bible, and in which, ultimately, he kept his copies of the revolutionary paper. The pages of the publication—its words printed in double columns originally on a monthly basis, then later weekly, from 1886 until 1895, and filled with the revolutionary musings of Morris, Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and other radical luminaries of the late-Victorian years—had passed from Morris to his close friend, the typographer Emery Walker; from Walker to his daughter and from her to a poet named Norman Hidson. Chimen eventually bought it from Hidden for £50. And there they stayed, in their Bible box, high on a wooden shelf in the upstairs hallway at 5 Hillway, for more than half a century.

Those pages were some of Chimen’s most treasured possessions, their crinkly texture and age-browned color conjuring images of the cultured, tea-drinking revolutionaries who had made up Morris’s coterie. I imagine that, in many ways, Chimen saw himself in their stories. The front-page manifesto in The Commonweal’s first issue, sold to readers for one penny in February 1886 and signed by the twenty-three founders of the Socialist League, put the mission simply: “We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.” On May Day the following year, the date on which it was announced that the paper would be published weekly, Morris and his friend Ernest Belfort Bax wrote an editorial: “We are but few, as all those who stand by principles must be until inevitable necessity forces the world to practise those principles. We are few, and have our own work to do, which no one but ourselves can do, and every atom of intelligence and energy that there is amongst us will be needed for that work."