I’m Reading… “The Diary of a Bookseller” by Shaun Bythell

I didn’t actually read this book, I listened to it on Audible, which is deeply ironic, but I didn’t realise that at the time.

Shaun Bythell’s diary is an autobiographical look at his life running a bookshop in the Scottish market town of Wigtown which is Scotland’s national book town and home to the Wigtown Book Festival.

In choosing this book I seem to have cemented myself into a series of autobiographical books about people and their occupations for which I present as evidence:

• I’m reading… “The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District” by James Rebanks
• I’m reading… “The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country” by Helen Russell

This is not a complaint, just an observation about a genre of books which I have loved, much to my surprise.

Anyway, back to the irony of listening to this book on Audible. Bookshops have been closing across the UK, including the obliteration of at least one major chain. What’s the primary driver behind this shift in our buying habit – Amazon. The number of books that we buy has been about the same for a number of years, the difference is that we no longer buy them on the high street, we either order them from Amazon, or download them to our Kindles. Shaun Bythell loves the Kindle so much that he has one which he peppered with a shotgun mounted as a trophy on a wall in the shop.

For those of you still looking for the irony, I should point out that Audible is also owned by Amazon.

This Diary of a Bookseller is partly about the daily interactions between a bookshop and the Amazon gorilla, and partly about the daily interactions with visitors to the bookshop. One is strangely faceless and bleak, the other portrays the British public in their eclectic and eccentric diversity.

Amazon has become so pervasive that there’s no way of avoiding it and Shaun is no exception listing many of his books there. This puts him at the mercy of the Amazon algorithms and creates a constant need for good reviews and high fulfilment ratios.

Sometimes the eccentricities of the British public are wonderful, at other times they make you want to scream. From the people who expect to pay the sleeve price for a book that is labelled in shillings and pence, to the people who are delighted to have found a book for which they have been on a long search. From the people who order books from a secondhand bookshop who complain that the book was indeed secondhand, to the people who sit by the fire in the shop building a pile of books which they then buy. This books is about a bookshop but, for me, it was primarily about these interactions.

I liked this book, a lot.