Happy New Year in the Bookshop!
It’s my first full day back in and you know that means I’m going to gently avoid doing much of anything so I can document, in full, the delightful tedium and torment of being here, for you, my most excellent audience.
A quick thank you from the business for all the orders we took through December via our Bookshop.Org page - I know they came via the links in this newsletter and we appreciate them so much, and then a more romantic thank you from me personally, to all the readers who upgraded their subscriptions last month. You’ll see I have a sweet little tick next to my name now; my favourite Christmas present.
January is of course, the worst month for retail, especially in a shop where almost everything is still full price. Weather-wise, it’s very Januaryish out there too; cold, wet and misty. Can’t say I’m expecting a lot of customers today, so we’ll see how this format works when there’s no material. Who will buy… who will buy…WHO WILL BUY THIS WONDERFUL MORNING? (firm sale).
The heating hasn’t been on while we’ve been closed so the shop feels somehow colder than outside at the moment, but in exciting receptacle news, I got an insulated coffee cup for Christmas and the Barista just filled it to the top and only charged me for a small. I bought it forty minutes ago and it’s still too hot to drink!
A delivery came yesterday (we were closed) but the hairdressers next door took the boxes so I’ve got something to get on with straight away. Unpack the boxes. Tick off the invoices. Fold the packing paper down. Cut up the boxes for recycling.
This is actually the bit I think about when people say “I’d love to work in a bookshop” so I think, very gently in return, “…weirdo.”
Huzzah! First phone call of the day is a customer ordering a stack of Wilbur Smith books. This sort of order is likely to be better than our whole day’s takings, so to get it through as the first sale is such a boost. Imagine reading ten novels by the same author though, I could never!
The thing about these insulated cups though, they’re not warm enough to wrap your hands round but the insides are still too hot to drink.
I write myself an urgent post-it note to select a book for Book Club in February. By the way, the January Book Club read is The New Life by Tom Crewe. I’ll be holding my in-person meetings at the end of the month, when I’ll also open the discussion thread here for paid subs. I haven’t started reading it yet, but that’s my plan for tonight! I’ve got that Friday feeling… to do some quiet reading.
No customers yet but the phone customer rang back and ordered another five books.
Midday. Finally finished my coffee. I mean if that’s how long it’s going to stay hot, and I get 2 x the loyalty stamps at Cafe Nero for bringing my own cup, I’m basically an investment banker now. Still no customers.
First person in the shop and it’s the window cleaner.
“Haven’t seen your Mum in ages” he says, “is she still cruising?”
“No, she’s back from the cruise but she’s gone to Spain” I say.
“Flippin’eck” he says “I should get myself a bookshop!” We laugh because we both know the bookshop has nothing to do with it. “Mind you,” he adds, “I’m going on a cruise next week.”
Maybe I should become a window cleaner?!
12.30 and the first customer arrives. It’s a beloved book club member and her little women. They have book tokens to spend but do a decent thing and spend more anyway. Phew. First cash in the till today, ker-ching!
Wahey, husband and daughter arrive with goods from the bakery because I made a bad decision this morning in that I chose to bring a lunch that had no pastry on it.
A little boy in a dinosaur fleece makes me realise we are way down on dinosaur storybooks. Luckily he still finds a neat little stack of stuff to buy - a dinosaur book, a dinosaur finger puppet, dinosaur stencil set and a book about… penguins. I hastily order some more dinosaur storybooks.
The shelves are all looking a bit slack after the decimation of December. January is a tricky time because you need new stock and for the books to not all be falling over in the baggy bookshelves, but you also can’t spend too much because you aren’t going to sell very much. I’m browsing the catalogue and trying to remember that I don’t need to order every new title that I want to read myself, because there are only 24 hours in a day and approximately 2400000000 books that I bought last year with the same intention.
Even though there’s a big yellow stripe on the door I still managed to trip up
(This happens a lot.)
Here’s a gorgeous proof parcel I received, complete with pannetone (yes! the kind without dried fruit!) and a silky scarf that I now realise I should have put on for a photo except I didn’t have any fabulous black sunglasses to hand and those really are the main difference between chic and geriatric when it comes to scarves-as-bonnets. Anyway, the book is Teddy by Emily Dunlay and it sounds extremely glamorous.
It is the summer of 1969 and Rome is awash with glamour and intrigue: the stars of Cinecittà are drinking and dancing along the paparazzo-lined Via Veneto, rubbing shoulders with royalty, American expats, and sometimes even Russian spies. Teddy Huntley Carlyle is fresh off a plane from Texas with a new husband in tow and a new life on the horizon. She’s earned a fresh start. In Rome, Teddy will be good. She will wear the right clothes and the perfect lipstick and she will charm her husband’s colleagues at the Embassy.
And Teddy is good, until the Fourth of July, when her new life explodes alongside the fireworks above her head. She is caught on camera in the arms of the American ambassador just moments after spotting a man from the darkest corner of her past across the room. There it is, the evidence of her rot, on film. Trying to recover the photographs and keep her reputation intact, Teddy descends into the underbelly of the city…but is she in over her head?
It comes out in July so we can all feel like Tanya McQuoid when we read it.
Trying to decipher Business Mum’s note in the book - customer has ordered two books but one of them has a question mark next to it. Both have arrived in today’s order. I call the customer to give them the good news.
“Oh, the other lady said I should go and look in the other shop for one of them in case they had it… and they did… and they had the other one I ordered too… so I got them both.”
Here to help!
As it’s a New Year we have a new customer order book. Very exciting. Business Mum has carefully copied over the outstanding 2023 orders into the new book… straight onto The Endpapers! As a person who can barely commit words to a new notebook for fear of spoiling it, this absolutely horrifies me. She did it last year too; wrote casual, temporary notes on the inside covers of the diary, that then have a line drawn through them because they’re no longer useful. Obviously I would have written them on a separate piece of paper, which then would have obviously got lost, which is why I can’t ever find anything that I need, but still… The!End!Papers!
Has your mum recovered from her trip?
Sir, she is so recovered she’s gone on another one.
Inadvertently attach the last screenshot on my phone to a customer text. I notice before I send it. A million points to anyone who can guess what it was (I’ll never tell.)
Here’s a boring story. Business Mum ordered me some fancy shampoo for Christmas because she knows I only buy whatever is on offer at the supermarket and when I got the fancy bottle home I put it down next to a lamp and it shone through the plastic revealing that the bottle was already at least a third empty. The shop immediately sent out a replacement bottle, which was delivered to the bookshop… when we were closed. The delivery photo just showed our own door, it was a mystery! Where was the parcel?! None of our neighbours had the package and it seemed too good to be true that I would ever end up with 1 and 2/3rds bottles of nice shampoo. BUT JUST NOW a courier came into the shop with a little box and re-delivered the package! Told you it was boring.
A lady comes heaving into the bookshop to pick up her order before I close. “You’ve saved my bacon!” she says. Which shows that sometimes, there really is a book emergency, and it affects bacon too.
Time to cash up. Forgot to pick a book club book for Feb even though the post-it note is NEON YELLOW.
I feel like this is really not a great edition of the Receipts to kick off the new year, but here’s the reality of January in a small bookshop! Almost nothing happened today! There were like four actual paying customers in the shop today and three of them paid in part with gift tokens. That’s liiiiife! Anyway, as Business Mum is vaguely sunning herself for the next week, I’ll be here every day, collating some bonus bits from the bookshop for my paid subs, before the next full (free) Receipt next Friday. You’d better bait your breath now.
You can support my bricks and mortar bookshop by buying your books via this link, and you can support me as a writer by taking out a paid sub to this Substack. Thanks.
The reality is what makes it SO interesting to read. Although I do quite like it when you quote a custom (or passer-by) who says something bonkers. When I worked in a bookshop as a teenager I loved sorting deliveries and ticking them off the list, I even find flattening cardboard boxes satisfying, so call me weird!
Oof, I work in a bookstore as well, and felt the "your order arrived, even though you apparently bought the books elsewhere after you placed said order" IN MY SOUL.