Hello, it is I, your manic salted pixie bookshop dream girlaccino and this is the next update live from the bookshop.
It’s the last day of the month which means a frantic dash to hit a sales target that absolutely does not exist. Unless something phenomenal happens today, August 2023 will not outperform August 2022, which means my mum business partner makes it red on her spreadsheet. That crimson shame. We’re longing for the viridescent days of August 2022, which is green on her spreadsheet because it outperformed August 21. Which was red. And like a tomato rolling down a hill it goes red, green, red, green, red, green, and therefore doesn’t matter at all, until it goes splat.
These posts will remain free, with comments open so you can send me queries like ‘What’s a good joke book for children?’1 and ‘What colour would it be if the takings were exactly the same as the previous year?2’
Tree Book Girl came back! I showed her the book, still on the customer shelf. “I can’t buy it,” she said. Oh, okay. Then she asked if she could volunteer here? I’m stumped.3
ooh look a bookshop - it’s tiny!
(this is notable because the shop is actually very reasonably sized?)
A returning visiting family picked up a nice stack of purchases including Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite, a signed Anne Booth, whose handwriting looks so much like my own I did a double take when I clocked it (but, I mean, why would have I written in there??), this tremendously good MG novel and some other stuff I can’t remember now. The youngest was wearing a The Phoenix hoodie, which is deeply impressive to me. I have a pin badge, but I’m not wearing it today, dammit.
I’m unpacking a delivery which includes some Tessa Hadley books for a customer who has recently discovered her writing and wants to go back to the beginning. She ordered these books with me on Tuesday, so I was able to tell her all about how I stumbled across Tessa Hadley, live in conversation with Ali Smith, when I accidentally attended the Louisiana Literature festival on my holiday last week in Copenhagen.4
11.25. Stood up to get a biscuit. My watch said ‘Great! You’re active again!’
Only one of the books in today’s delivery is actually for me, and it’s the second time I’ve had to order it in because at the weekend mum unpacked it and promptly sold it, along with that Eileen Gray graphic novel I hadn’t yet paid for! I mean, you can’t really deny a customer when their taste is that good. Anyway, the book I’ve re-ordered and will purchase today is Bold Ventures; Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy. Talk about a great subtitle.
A lovely american lady, who runs creative arts classes for children in Florida, had a good browse around the shelves. She was at her leisure, her husband was playing golf. St. Annes has two golf courses, we get a lot of golf visitors, and wives-of-golf-visitors. She was delighted to discover the work of Catherine Rayner - whose work she hadn’t seen before but was immediately besotted with. She said it “made her want to get the paints out” and also that she “had a thing with foxes”. She was also really taken with our selection of Lanka Kade wooden animals - so much in fact, that she bought nearly twenty of them, and picked up an errant cardboard box to bring all her purchases to the till in. She flies back to the States tomorrow, her hand luggage now weighed down by small wooden farm animals and other critters. “I’m so glad I came down this way!” she said as she left. Me too, lady, me too!
Three young boys come into the shop, they’re around thirteen. They cram as close to the till as they can get, aggressively drinking pop at me. “Do you know where there’s a charity shop?” one says, suddenly directed at me “but not the one up there (points vaguely to a bookshelf).” Before I can say get out of my pub anything, another one launches into a description of the item they’re trying to procure. “We want to get these things, they’re like firecrackers. You pull the string and it goes off.” The third one pipes up while the other two go back to slurping. “Like confetti. But not.”
I’ve said nothing at all. Why would I know where to buy these items? Why would a charity shop have them? Why do they think it’s okay to come and guzzle cola in my face? Why did they walk into the bookshop at all? Why didn’t they even say hello? or Excuse me? Or anything at all, before launching into this random assault of a conversation that they assume I’d be interested in being involved with? Do they think I am also a child, or that I’m so ancient they don’t need to explain theirselves to me?Why are they standing so close?
“I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” I finally say, when there’s a window in the slurps. They abruptly leave without any further acknowledgment of what we’ve shared/I’ve had thrust upon me.
“Maybe B+M Bargains would have them.” One says on the way out.
“I got kicked out of there” the other replies.
A chain gang of toddlers, hitched together with neon straps, en route to the beach from a nearby nursery, goes past the bookshop with their responsible adults. “Are you a big book reader?” I hear one of them ask a very tiny boy. “Yep!” he says. Good lad.
I discuss margin widths with a customer who buys Sarah Waters and George Orwell. The customer’s favourite book is The Magus, which reminds me that I have no idea what that book is about - it always has birds on the front, doesn’t it? After he leaves I read the synopsis of The Magus. Bloody hell. Sounds great. Still not sure I know what it’s actually about though. Anyway, looks like Vintage are repackaging Fowles with these nice colourful editions. I order six of them.
A few customers come to collect their book club books for next month. Usually we distribute these at the meetings but when people are away they tend to call in and catch up. Next month my book club are reading Lizzy Stewart’s beautiful graphic novel/illustrated novel hybrid, Alison - a book I really love. This will be the book clubs’s first foray into graphic novels so it’ll be interesting to see what the reception has been like at the end of September. I think it’s going to win over a few people who’d never shop from the Graphic Novel shelves - and maybe even convince them to try some others! It’s book club on Monday so as well as presenting their September read, I’ll be discussing the August book; How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina. Which is an absolute ripper - so fresh and funny and fast-paced. I can’t wait to hear what everyone else thought of it!
I love the smell of the books. Some people like grass, don’t they?
Some woman, just out here stating cold hard facts.
Here’s something I wrote in a previous post but it’s worth recycling here:
Bookshops smell of books. Unfortunately for booksellers it’s like smelling your own perfume; impossible to detect on yourself and when people comment on it you wonder if they mean it in a bad way.
The good people at Macmillan Children’s Books have sent me a package of magnet words to promote The 169-Storey Treehouse so I’m sneaking a sheet of them home to make poems with my daughter about ‘monkeys’ and ‘catapult’ and ‘jelly?’ and ‘bum!’ Here’s the full sheet so you can play along too.
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.
We’ll probably never know.
Definitely my last joke about this now.
It’s a paywalled piece but you can activate a free trial to access it.
Oh stop, now I have another 3 or 4 books to add to my reading list.
Like Ella I read The Magus in my 20s, I remember loving it and deciding it was my favourite book, but now I only have vague island feelings - I’d like to reread but worry it wouldn’t live up to my memories!