Shaun Bythell > Quotes

“I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Money can't buy happiness, BUT it can buy books (which is basically the same thing).”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Prefacing a sentence with 'I don't want to appear rude, but...' flags up the same alarm bells as 'I am not racist, but...' It's quite simple: if you don't want to appear rude, don't be rude. If you're not a racist, don't behave like a racist.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“In the shop I have a quotation from Erasmus painted on a wall which reads ‘Whenever I have money I buy books. Whatever is left I spend on food and clothes.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“At 10 a.m. the first customer came throught the door: 'I'm not really interested in books' followed by 'Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.' By 10.30 a.m. the will to live was but a distant memory.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“The shop was quiet until about 11.30 a.m., when a few people began to trickle in. After lunch a teenage girl – who had been sitting by the fire reading for an hour – brought three Agatha Christie paperbacks to the counter; the total came to £8. She offered me a limp fiver and said, ‘Can I have them for £5?’ I refused, telling her that the postage on Amazon alone would come to £7.40. She wandered off muttering about getting them from the library. Good luck with that: Wigtown library is full of computers and DVDs and not a lot of books”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down - as if for confirmation of this - then looked back at me and said, 'A dead bird can't fall out of it's nest', and left the shop fly still agape.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“A customer at 11.15 a.m. asked for a copy of Far from the Maddening Crowd. In spite of several attempts to explain that the book's title is actually Far from the Madding Crowd, he resolutely refused to accept that this was the case, even when the overwhelming evidence of a copy of it was placed on the counter under this nose: 'Well, the printers have got that wrong.' Despite the infuriating nature of this exchange, I ought to be grateful: he has given me an idea for the title of my autobiography should I ever be fortunate enough to retire.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 booksneatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be riffling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extroidinary.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“It should go without saying that anyone who introduces themselves as 'a bit weird' is almost certainly not.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“Після роботи записав у саду коротке відео про те, як оновити кіндл до моделі Kindle Fire. Потрібно два літри бензину й сірники.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“the immersive capacity of a good novel to transport you into a different world is unique to the written word.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“very broadly speaking—people can be divided into two groups: those who have worked in a bar, or café, or restaurant, or shop, and those who have not. And while it would be both unfair and untrue to say that everyone in the latter category treats those in the former as a second-class citizen, it is probably accurate to say that virtually nobody from the first category will do so.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“Shortly afterwards, a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he'd borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Philately will get you nowhere in The Book Shop.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Karl-Heinz ‘fed’ me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fibre of meat, every cartilaginous module of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervour.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“У книгарні тисячі книжок всіх кольорів і відтінків. Кожна обкладинка — це двері на магічних завісах”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Я назбирав цілу гору книжок, у які поринав, тікаючи від світу навколо й усередині мене.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“I ought also to apologise for perpetuating stereotypes, when in reality people are far more nuanced and exist in endless subtle shades of characteristics. Generalisations are unfair, but so is life. Suck it up.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“It never fails to baffle me that someone could be bored in a bookshop, with the possible exception of someone who can’t read, which pretty much excludes all adults.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“The kindness of strangers can reduce you to your knees in a sobbing mess faster than a well-aimed punch to the solar plexus.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“This group derives an alternate sort of gratification from the fact that their niche obsession somehow differentiates them from other people, mistakenly assuming that it makes them more interesting.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“This afternoon there was a very satisfying encounter involving a customer who began requesting a discount on a pile of books about the Rolls-Royce company. His friend prodded him in the back and said, ‘You’ve got some nerve, asking for a discount from this poor bloke while you drive about in your fancy Rolls-Royces.’ He didn’t get a discount.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“On the news this morning was a story about four men who have been abducted from a bookshop in Hong Kong for disseminating literature critical of the Chinese regime. Bookselling can be a perilous business, but mercifully only financially so in Wigtown.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“These abominable creatures have only one redeeming feature, and that is that they believe that books are cool, in the same way that they believe that vinyl, tweed and beards are cool.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“Today’s post brought four more anonymous postcards, including one quoting from The Meaning of Liff, a book in which Douglas Adams and John Lloyd took an assortment of British place-names and ascribed them meanings, as though in a dictionary. One”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Started reading The Restraint of Beasts.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Beyond this, I know nothing about him, not even his first name. In fact, I often wonder why he orders books through me when he could so easily do so on Amazon. Perhaps he does not own a computer. Perhaps he does not want one. Or perhaps he is one of the dying breed who understand that, if they want bookshops to survive, they have to support them.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller