“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” Small-town settings are irresistible for many readers, and by now the fairly small cast of characters in Bythell’s books feel like old friends.I can think of a few specific reasons why Bythell’s journals are such addictive reading: I often read a whole month’s worth of entries at a sitting.
I’ve heard Zadie Smith say the same about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: it’s just the stuff of prosaic, everyday life and yet she refers to his memoirs/autofiction as literary crack. So many readers tell me that they cannot put my journals down. There is something about a journal, I think, that does this to readers. I am reading it much too fast and I think I shall have to read it again. I find hers extremely good reading, so I cannot bear to stop. Reading May Sarton’s Encore recently, I came across a passage where she is reading a fellow writer’s journal (Doris Grumbach’s Coming into the End Zone): (The average spend seems to be £10 per customer, which is fine in high tourist season but not so great in November and December when hardly anyone walks through the door.) In between, Bythell details notable customer encounters, interactions with shop helpers or local friends, trips out to buy book collections or go fishing, Wigtown events including the book festival, and the occasional snafu like the boiler breaking during a frigid November or his mum being hospitalized with a burst ulcer. It’s the same winning formula as ever: the nearly daily entries start with the number of online orders received and filled, and end with the number of customers and the till takings for the day. Williamson’s 1904 Bits from an Old Bookshop. As in its predecessors, each monthly section is prefaced by an epigraph from a historical work on bookselling – this time R. This third volume opens in February 2016. (I’ve also reviewed the follow-up, Confessions of a Bookseller, which was an enjoyable read for me during a 2019 trip to Milan, and 2020’s Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops.) It’s just over five years since many of us were introduced to Wigtown and the ups and downs of running a bookshop there through Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. Remainders of the Day: More Diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown by Shaun Bythell Here’s one of each, linked by their ‘remain’ titles.
I’ve mentioned before that the month’s crop of nonfiction was about either books or death. There was way too much to say about each of these excellent books (the first two pairs are here and here Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder is still to come, probably on Wednesday). I raced to finish all the September releases on my stack by the 30th, thinking I’d review them in one go, but that ended up being far too unwieldy.
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