The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (2017)

This was a fun read, and in some ways very familiar. I have spent large swathes of my working life in the bookshop trade, both secondhand and new. This volume's recounting of the quirks (to put it kindly) of some bookshop customers is one of its main calling cards. But what is it about south-west Scotland in terms of attraction for the insane? Because the regularity of Shaun's teeth being set on edge, or his fulminating anger being inspired, is truly epic. Most of these oddnesses are very familiar, but usually happened, in my time, at decent distances from one another. For Shaun, it's every other day. Or is there something about Shaun which inspires the incipiently mad to suddenly flower into full certifiability? The humour, which is the other calling card of this one, tended to run in waves I found, but still gave it an entertaining twist. The best of it is Nicky, a second-in-command who has a predilection for skip-jumping for grossly mashed culinary delights, a sarcastic sourness in dealing with Shaun's dourness, a delightfully whacko sense of logic, peculiar dress sense, and Latter Day Saint convictions. If the rumbles are true that this one will be filmed, I hope the producers haven't overlooked the fact that the inescapable casting for this part is Siobhan Redmond. There were some less intentional revelations tucked away here. Shaun seems to have quite straightforwardly egalitarian political convictions, but also seems to be a little in awe of greatness and goodness, and very happy to give way to the occasional bout of middle-class aspiration. I loved his stories of heading out to look at collections for sale, and the consistent excitement of 'I wonder if there'll be something rare and amazing in this lot?'. And of course the other side of that coin, when the disappointment sets in at coming face to face with a pile of tat. A few of his pronoucements on the history of the trade, and how we got to the Amazon-squashed disaster we're currently navigating, were a little bit off in some of their details, but very much on the money in their diagnosis of the problem. Great fun - 'I look forward to the sequel', I say, in that worrying way that signifies the trashy serialised crud (thus revealing my partially insupportable prejudices) of modern new bookselling, and to which Shaun has given in - it was published last year. Of course there's more to sequels than their modern sludge-instantiation, and of course, I'm sure Shaun's fits that much more classic bill.