The Canberra Lifeline book fairs continually reaffirm that readers still love to buy print books in a digital era. Lifeline benefits from the donations of books as retirees downsize. Canty's bookshop in Fyshwick, the interior of which increasingly resembles the Doctor Who Tardis in terms of external/ internal dimensions, is also the recipient of some significant collections.
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Luke Canty's facebook blog pales in comparison, however, to the diaries published by Shaun Bythell, whose Wigtown secondhand bookshop is the largest in Scotland with over 100,000 books.
The latest in Bythell's best-selling series, Remainders of the Day (Profile Books, $29.99), features more of his strange and eccentric customers, including a woman who comes in to ask if he has any books on "cooking with roadkill". When Bythell replies in the negative, she responds, "I've just written one", and demands he buy it. Another customer wants him to find The Behavioural Effects of Canine Castration.
Bythell juxtaposes accounts of his personal life with book buying trips, ongoing battles with Amazon and the interactions with his Italian assistant Emanuela, who daily gives him the finger from the adjoining bus stop as she leaves each day. Another assistant, Meredith, frustrates him by her constant misshelving, such as Swallows and Amazons being placed in the ornithology section
Also reappearing is "Sandy the Tattooed Pagan", who uses the shop to sell his carved walking sticks, greeting "visitors like a king greeting his courtiers". Bythell's post-COVID epilogue, written in 2022, reaffirms his commitment to bookselling, with "the shop never having been so busy".
Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon A Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller (Bantam, $35) and A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir by Marius Kociejowski (Biblioasis, $29.99) reflect on their employment in high end London antiquarian bookshops.
Darkshire joined Sotheran's, established in 1761, at the age of 20 as an apprentice. His book recounts his decade with them, while Kociejowski reflects back on 45 years with various London antiquarian booksellers, notably Bertram Rota.
Kociejowski provides more bibliophilic depth in his memoirs, but the geeky Darkshire, who increased Sotheran's sales through social media, provides a younger perspective. Darkshire takes pleasure in dividing customers into categories such as "Smaugs, Draculas, the Spindleman, Cryptids and Suited Gentlemen". "Smaugs' covet everything, while "Draculas" specialise in one collecting area. His range of contacts include shoplifters, book runners and collection downsizers. Darkshire concludes that book collectors should either live alone or marry a co-collector.
Kociejowski muses that "the book trade is a floating world for people of intelligence unsuited for anything else". Nonetheless he seems to have survived quite well, recounting experiences with a range of literarti including Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin. Patti Smith comes looking for essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, Brian Ferry buys Wyndham Lewis and Kociejowski sells a second edition of Finnegans Wake to Johnny Depp, who was "trying incredibly hard not to be recognised and with predictably comic results".
Philip Larkin visited Rota looking for first editions of his own books, but when quoted £200 for a copy of his first book, The North Ship, replied that he would not pay that price, "for that piece of rubbish!" A more productive outcome comes when Margaret Thatcher's office buys a superbly bound copy of Great Expectations for presentation to Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit.
Kociejowski notes that, while there are a number of female bookshop owners, there are fewer female collectors than men, reflecting, he believes, that women are usually more interested in reading the text of books than just collecting them. Valerie Eliot, the second wife of T.S. Eliot, was an avid collector, adding to her late husband's library. Kociejowski recounts how one collector stalked T.S. Eliot, even following him into the ICA toilet to sign books. In related fashion, Kociejowski was once reprimanded for sending a customer, looking for Marilyn French's The Women's Room, to the toilet rather than the feminist fiction section.
Independent new bookshops catering to their local communities have largely managed to survive in the face of Amazon and other discount providers. They have also increasingly become the location of novels in recent decades.
The University of Bangor's "Reader in Bookselling" (apparently the only such position in the world), Eben J. Muse, in Fantasies of the Bookstore (Cambridge University Press, $24.95), documents and analyses nearly 500 "bookstore" novels. Muse claims the first bookstore novel published in English was Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels (1917), followed by its more famous sequel, The Haunted Bookshop (1918), the first example of a bibliomystery, books which now comprise two thirds of Muse's entries.
