posted on 20 Oct 2021

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

When Shaun Bythell’s first volume of bookselling memoirs, Diary of a Bookseller, was reviewed here on Letterpress, it was dealt with a little sternly, I thought. The review suggested that it could have been a much more interesting and perhaps genuinely instructive book had it focused more on the book trade rather than humorous anecdotes and Bythell’s own curmudgeonly persona. This prepared me for a book that I was probably going to heartily dislike and so when  I eventually got around to reading it I did so with some trepidation. And found that I loved it.

Since then Bythell has published a second volume, Confessions of a Bookseller. Again, I approached with caution: could a second installment really be justified? But I noted that Alan Bennett in his diaries said he found the second volume  “as absorbing as the first” and on that basis I bought a copy and squirrelled it away for a time when I might need some comfort reading.

Both books are simply daily diary accounts of what is involved in running the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland. The Bookshop is in Wigtown, in Dumfries and Galloway, south-west Scotland, a town of fewer than a thousand inhabitants, officially designated a ‘booktown’ in 1998 and therefore Scotland’s answer to Hay-on-Wye.

It is important to say that although published in 2019, Bythell’s second volume actually covers 2015. I eventually read it during the second COVID lockdown in 2020. If anything I enjoyed it even more than the first volume – while also finding it a profoundly melancholy experience.

Melancholy, because the most notable thing about the diaries is the detailed insights they offer into the immense social labour that forms the foundations of Bythell’s enterprise. For example, he is the secretary of the Wigtown Booksellers’ Association. He is one of the organisational mainstays of the annual Wigtown Book Festival, as well as the town’s Spring Festival. He is involved in numerous other local endeavours designed to boost the booktrade and wider cultural life of the area. He provides accommodation for writers, event organisers, festival-goers and other visitors. His shop hosts numerous local groups and activities that help create interest and support community life. And for much of 2020, virtually everything that makes not just Wigtown Books but the whole local economy, perhaps even the entire community, a viable proposition had to stop. In the depths of lockdown two I found it impossible to read Confessions without feeling that I was reading a testimony from a lost civilisation.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case. It must have been a truly dreadful time for small rural communities and tourist-dependent local economies but I see that the Wigtown Book Festival is back in COVID-safe form for autumn 2021 and Wigtown Books has a new and improved website. It is clearly too soon to be able to say that fragile communities such as these have recovered but there is now a degree of hope.

Anyway, I see that I have managed to say almost nothing about the most important qualities of these two books – that they are funny, fascinating, comforting and deeply enjoyable, with a real life-as-it-is-lived-here feeling about them. Now that the future is looking perhaps just a little less bleak, I am reading Confessions of a Bookseller for a second time – in a brighter mood and with great enjoyment.

From a personal perspective, I find that perhaps the single most notable thing about Bythell’s diaries is this. Albeit not in the secondhand book trade, I spent almost twenty years as a bookseller in various capacities and so would expect a considerable overlap between my own experiences and Bythell’s. But I now see how far removed they in fact are, and realise that what he does is far beyond me and far outside my comfort zone. For while Bythell may describe himself as a curmudgeon with relationship problems it is also evident that he is in fact deeply gregarious. And no matter how much he may sometimes protest, the sort of social and community obligations that enable places like Wigtown to work are in his blood.

If you enjoy books about books, about bookselling, small town life, or Scotland, don’t miss Shaun Bythell’s Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. They are marvellously enjoyable and also reward rereading. Even so, I read the sometimes terrifyingly small daily shop-takings recorded in each entry and wonder how such businesses are possible. ‘Passion’, ‘labours of love’, ‘it’s a calling’ – all of these would be the clichéd stock answers. But read Bythell’s books and I think you will agree that the real answer is probably far more complex.

 

Alun Severn

October 2021