posted on 23 Aug 2023

Remainders of the Day: More diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown by Shaun Bythell

Back in 2017, I reviewed Shaun Bythell’s first instalment of his bookshop diaries, Diary of a Bookseller, and although it is exactly the kind of book I normally enjoy gobbling down, I somehow felt there was something a little mean and knowingly sardonic about Bythell that left me feeling uncomfortable. Here was a man doing something lots of people can only dream of – running a bookshop – and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that he delights in making customers look silly and in suggesting that working in a bookshop is something other people should run away from as fast as they could. What seemed to me to be missing was a real and evident love for the books themselves.

Then in 2021, a great friend and contributor to this website, Alun Severn, reviewed the next instalment of Bythell’s diaries, Confessions of a Bookseller, and in that review he not only suggested that my earlier review was a bit harsh and sniffy but that Bythell’s books were great fun and not to be missed.

Well, these kinds of differences are the lifeblood of reviewing in my opinion because it proves there are no absolutes and that ultimately the only way to settle these things is to read the books for yourself. But it did make me wonder whether I’d been too po-faced in my original review – maybe, just maybe, I’d misjudged Bythell’s tone and demeanour. So, when I got the chance to read his most recent instalment, Remainders of the Day, I thought I should give it another go.

In the same way that Confessions of a Bookseller reflected back on an earlier period (it was published in 2019 but looked back on events of 2015), Remainders, published in 2022 covers the bookshop life in 2016. For those who have read the other books, the recipe will be familiar: a week-by-week (and often day-by-day) overview of the ups and downs of bookshop life from Bythell’s perspective. Sales totals, customer interactions, the always odd behaviour of the ‘staff’ who come and go but always seem to be somewhere between friends and employees and ongoing wrangles with Amazon and the online world.

I felt a little less uncomfortable with Bythell’s persona in Remainders – he presents a slightly softer side this time and the more waspish commentary seems to be reserved for family, friends and employees. His exasperation with being ‘delisted’ by Amazon and Abebooks forms a running thread through the entries and there is a little more detail about the nuts and bolts of keeping a shop open – including the breakdown of the heating and the demands of being integral to the Wigtown book festival.

But……but……I still find it hard to shake the feeling that something’s not quite right here. Bythell owns and runs the biggest second-hand bookshop in Scotland and yet, somehow, you never feel that he’s doing anything more trying to keep a tiny hand-to-mouth operation alive against all the odds. We never really get a sense of the real economics of the business – he’s able to buy stock, visit destinations to check whether he wants collections and even able to consider buying another property in town. He must have a reasonably substantial wage bill, keeps something of an ‘open house’ for friends who pass through, clearly makes a substantial contribution to Wigtown life and its festival and presumably wants to make money for himself – but you’ll find no real accounting for all this.

But, again, the thing that really niggles me is the absence of books – or maybe I should say a manifest love for books. Where is the delight when he finds something he loves? Where’s the time spent with the books he buys? There are virtually no descriptions or even real references to his books – he could, you feel, just be selling groceries. 

I think that, in the end, I have to conclude that he does what he does very well – it’s just that I want him to do something he never set out to do.

The book has just been released as a paperback and you should find a copy for under a tenner.

 

Terry Potter

August 2023