Bookshop owner and bestselling author reveals the seven kinds of people you find in his store

Seven Kinds Of People You Find In Bookshops

by Shaun Bythell (Profile £7.99, 144 pp)

There is a warm, cosy image of second-hand bookshops, in which cheerful and benign owners exchange friendly banter with well-informed and polite customers, both sides united by a love of books and the joy they can bring.

Then there is the reality.

Shaun Bythell has owned Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop (The Bookshop in Wigtown) for nearly 20 years. His previous offerings — The Diary Of A Bookseller and Confessions Of A Bookseller — were so successful that they’ve been translated into more than 20 languages.

This new book (what’s known in the trade as a ‘slim volume’) gives far from flattering — though often funny — descriptions of the seven ways in which Bythell’s customers drive him mad.

There is the Expert, the person who comes into the shop to impart rather than obtain information. ‘They like to sneer at you for not having heard of an obscure book about the Siberian tree snail.’ The Expert likes long words: ‘It’s as though they’ve dined out and eaten Will Self for a main course.’

Then there is the Aspirational Parent. Bythell’s response to them is simple: ‘I can tell you without the slightest shadow of doubt that four- year-old Tarquin does NOT want to read War And Peace.’

But, as with everything in life, parenting is a matter of balance. It’s heartbreaking to read about the mother who passed the shop with her three children, ignoring their pleas to go inside: ‘We’re not going in there, it’s just a shop selling old books.’

This reminded me of a friend, who heard a woman passing his shop. ‘Oh, I can never resist a second-hand bookshop,’ she said. ‘Do you want to go in?’ asked her companion. ‘Nah,’ said the woman.

Bythell’s misanthropy is at its best when it targets behaviour we all know from everyday life. ‘Anyone who introduces themselves as “a bit weird”,’ for instance, ‘is almost certainly not.’

Another evil is whistling, especially as the whistlers can never hold a tune. ‘Occasionally, you’ll catch a few accidental notes in a row which you imagine you recognise, and think, “Oh, Mahler’s 8th Symphony”, or “Ah, a Bond film theme tune”, but one note later you’ll be proved wrong.’

Some people come to Bythell not to buy books but to sell them — they’re self-published authors asking him to stock their titles. Any reviews of these efforts are almost always ‘by immediate family or terrified neighbours who risk boundary wall disputes’ if they don’t offer praise. As a side-note, we learn that the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past was initially self-published, as was Beatrix Potter’s The Tale Of Peter Rabbit.

A certain type of male browser likes to swap the dust jackets on similar-sized books. This is ‘to convince fellow customers that they are reading The Rolling Stock Of Britain’s Mainline Railway Operators And Light Rail Systems rather than The Mammoth Book Of Lesbian Erotica.’

All in all, you can see why staff members sometimes lose their rag. Bythell tells of an employee in an Edinburgh bookshop who was pestered for so long by a rude and difficult customer (‘an elderly twin-set-and-pearls Morningside woman’) that she eventually blurted out: ‘Oh, why don’t you just f*** off?’ The astonished customer instantly demanded to see the manager.

The employee nervously accompanied her to his office, convinced she’d just signed her own P45. The manager listened to the woman’s complaint, which finished with the employee’s profanity. ‘Then, why,’ he asked politely, ‘haven’t you f***ed off?’