Library Thoughts: THE BOOK SALE

Two days ago, not unusually, I came home with a book - but I can’t help thinking about the buying of the thing, both happily and sadly.

 

The particular book, COLOUR by Victoria Finlay, is not the cover shown, but a beautiful Folio Society hardback edition. Inside, there’s a rainbow’s worth of chapter openings, illustrations and photographs, and it is in almost pristine condition. I can’t recall such bright plates in my lost paperback version, so there’s which an added glory to this edition. Besides, it will complement a recent gift, THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOUR by Kassia St Clair - and they might inspire me to get out my paints again.

Now, this book treasure cost me just £3.00. £3.00! I bought it at my local library’s BOOK SALE, which is something that both pleases me and grieves me.

Pleasure, because the library BOOK SALE tables appear in the reception area every few weeks so I try to remember to keep a couple of bags in my pockets whenever I walk into town. My Book Sale trawl will vary according to the titles on the tables, but also on size and weight. Any bagfuls must be light enough for the fifteen-minute-walk home.

I do enjoy the wonderfully random selection of books on display and sometimes more get added while the Book Sale is running – like the COLOUR title, above. If I’m in the library, I might revisit those tables, hoping that beneath the popular diet cookbook or footballer’s dog-eared life-story or may lie as secret gem.

Pricing is very simple: works of Fiction (hardback or paperback) are 50p while Non-Fiction titles are usually £1.00. As the Book Sale runs on, the offerings grow thinner, and bigger bargains are there for the taking: three novels for 50p an/or non-fiction at two per pound coin.

Despite my personal book greed, I do ponder about this generously casual offloading. 

 

Where does the Book Sale stock come from?

From how many shelves and categories and libraries do the sale books come?

Across the whole of the admin area or the whole of the county?

Do the library staff (and volunteers?) cull the bookshelves just once a month? A season?

Or is it a continual process, with the Book Sale taking place whenever the surplus books and cardboard boxes are full?

And/Or do evil-minded electronic ticket machines secretly register the number of times a book has been taken out and – at some point - reject the barely-read book from the system?

One sad fact is that every single book represents an author in the form of a writer and maybe an illustrator and each book, when borrowed earns that author a small amount of money, which comes from the Public Lending Rights fund, or PLR. In past years, as a children’s author, PLR has kept me afloat - or afloat enough to pay any owed taxes.  

What comes around goes around and out the door again, eh? 

Which leads me to:

First Big PLR Point: the author’s titles do need to be there on the library shelves and available for borrowing. When I gaze at the tables of outcasts, it’s hard to tell if this or that copy is the last one left within the whole of that County’s library stock.

Second Big PLR Point: titles also do need to be there to be borrowed, registered within a system that is linked to PLR. 

Sadly, as far as I understand it, those Community Libraries that are now devolved from their County Council don’t register borrowings for PLR, nor do the various "Little Library" schemes, though I have heard of schemes being discussed. Therefore as more and more poorly-funded councils reduce support for public  libraries (if they even have libraries at at all, ala,) a great many authors will feel the pinch.

Here's where I should add that the amount of PLR that an individual author can earn has a top limit so the Rowlings, Rankins, Walliams and Dan Browns can’t bankrupt the system.

Consequently, while I might feel glad about the book-sale-books I carry home, I do also grieve when I see the BOOK SALE signs go up and all the discarded titles spread out across the tables.

Part of me wonders if all the cash raised goes back into purchasing new books. I do hope so, otherwise – with less money allocated to the library service – the shelves will soon empty.

And particularly poignant are the times when, scanning the children’s and teens booksale tables, I spy cast-off titles by favourite writers and writing friend I know: the books I may have heard about as first imagining, or met in draft form, or worked and written and accepted, and then finally published and reviewed and out there for their readers – and now, and now . . . .

Quickly crossing my fingers, I fling out a hope that there’s still one copy, at least, of that particular title left somewhere in the library system – not only for the PLR, involved, but so that that author’s work is still there to be read.

 There will surely be more library thoughts to come.

BOOKSHELVES & A BOOKSELLER & THE NUMBER THIRTY

How many books - and how many bookshelves do you need? Or do you fit into your rooms? Or would, if you were a bookseller?

Marie Kondo, the tidiness lifestyle guru, said - or so I first heard – that she only keeps thirty books on her bookshelf. 

Across the media, people responded angrily to this meagre allowance until other people, not quite as aghast, explained that thirty was merely the number that Marie Kondo had said sparked joy for her in her own surroundings. It seemed you could keep as many books as you liked, really, as long the books looked orderly and your didn’t forget that there are storage facilities available for hiding ugly, faded or visually disreputable titles. In the land of the decluttered, nostalgia is not queen.

However, that cruel total of thirty wasn’t a shock to me. In my experience whenever I’ve peered into interior design magazines, I rarely see shelves bearing a satisfying quantity of books. 

The magazines might show a few, new, evenly-sized books balanced on a tiny, amusingly-designed wall-shelf: a circle perhaps, or an S or Z-shape or rope in a lifebelt: certainly never shelving that’s any way substantial or roomy.

Alternatively – especially around late autumn when there is a need to feel cosier– a fully-lined library will appear as one of the magazine settings. The photographs will show a grand interior, where an impressive quantity of volumes rises from floor to ceiling and runs across the tops of doorways and windows. So many books, ah yes!

A polished wooden ladder will be at hand to reach those high, dust-free shelves and, come October, a fashionable dog will be lolling by a flickering hearth. Unfortunately, if the "big bookshelf" issue is planned for November, a Christmas tree with all its decorations will block the way to any of the reading material. 

I know these glossy bookshelf pages are merely created as backdrops and sets for designer fantasies and probably don’t exist within any real rooms either, but they are so little use if one has a reasonable number of books.

I look around me: the books home here are so real and so many that most shelves are double-stacked and are often disorderly. 

All of these facts made reading Shawn Bythell’s memoir, THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER, a very suitable and cheering New Year experience. 

 

The diary is a half-despairing glimpse into the running the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland, which was what had occupied Bythell since 2001.

In 2004, he became involved in establishing Wigtown, Galloway, as a “Book Town”, complete with its own annual Book Festival and then, recently, took a long break.  

THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER is one result of his sabbatical.

 

Bythell's account of his trade is never idyllic and the characters are rarely literary celebrities. He is offering the reader his diary: each daily entry starts with online orders and books found, and ends with the number of customers and amount of the cash taken at the till. Some days are definitely unprofitable. 

For example, one early February Friday lists 2 online orders and 2 books found, while – by evening – only 4 customers have come in and there is just £67.00 in the till. Not a life of glamour and riches at all.

However, in between the worrying totals, Bythell describes constant battles with the crumbling Georgian shop walls, heating failures, eccentric assistants with fould eating habits, ungrateful customers and the problems of book-shelf label management , all recounted with a charming grumpiness and even a dour, stubborn kind of hope.

There are, for those that know the tv series, faint echoes of Black Books, but THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER offers a lot more sociability as well as glimpses of the local Galloway landscape and community and the odd contents of personal libraries up for sale.

He also mentions forgotten planning permission for the doorway, and demands from customers eager to sleep in THE BOOKSHOP’s festival bed. In fact, one Wigtown bookseller was – at the time of his writing - letting out her premises, week by week, to people eager to fulfil their dream of running a bookshop - DIY B&B&B anyone? - adding that there were bookings for years ahead.

Despite publicity snippets, I didn’t find THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER a “hilarious” laugh-a-line kind of book but very few are, are they? Sometime the mood was the very opposite, when Bythell mutters about Amazon and Abebooks predatory practices and their dire effect on the bookshops and second-hand booksellers. 

 

So, not a hilarious read, then - but as someone interested in all aspects of the books world, I certainly found Bythell’s memoir (pbk 2018 ) worth my time. THE DIARY OF A BOOKSELLER was a pleasure and a suitably wintry amusement: it is very unlikely to encourage new members to the trade but highly likely to increase the number of wistful, bookish visitors in Galloway.

I must, considering my earlier rant, mention that the copy contains b&w photographs of the shop, and its books, and its shelves- and I am very sure they are all satisfyingly real. There's also an audiobook, which would surely make a wonderful bedtime story!

CRANKING UP THE LAPTOP AGAIN.

Today is the 5^th of February 2019. Already. The snow came, went and will probably come again.

After Twelfth Night, the tinsel stuff was packed away, but I hadn't stowed the nativity set away. I'd got used to seeing small cast of characters parade along the mantelpiece.

A few days away in Dublin happened and then I spotted the whole gang still there, quite comfortable. For a moment I hesitated but they didn't seem appropriate any longer, especially as by then I was ferreting through all the bills & receipt for the tax returns. 

A new arrival - an imposing Augustus Caesar figurine? or a Herod? - might have fitted the atmosphere, but he would arrive too late. So back into their seasonal gold biscuit tin the holy folk went and away into the cupboard. The tin isn't used for real biscuits, obviously.

Joy! The the dread paperwork was safely done, the money paid and returns sent to HMRC. Sighs of relief and wide vistas opening out around me . . . . .  

And then came the wild fantasy. 

Could the Cranky Laptop blog be brought to life again? 

Re-started? Be useful - and be fun?

 

The timing is well more than appropriate, machine-wise. The morning after The Tax was done, I cheerfully sat down at my ancient Desktop Box and pressed the big round button. The blue circle of light flickered on, as normal, and then off and the humming stopped. The Destop went ominously quiet and dark . . . . 

Oh well. . . . Oh bother.. . . And more . . .

So here I am, with the Destop dead, getting used to my New Blue laptop all over again. I have loved and admired the slim new thing greatly: for a start it works without the yards of power cable its very Cranky Laptop predecessor needed all the time.

However, I have Tech Imposter Syndrome. Unfamiliar keyboard layouts and actions easily send me into a panic.  What better way to face the unfamiliarity than crank up the blog once more? And so it begins . . .

If you see a tear-stain on a post here, don’t be alarmed. I’m not really alarmed either for the word is that Blogs are No Longer Read by anyone, not even by those who write them. Slipping back into the cavernous, almost anonymous silence feels so much easier.

As nobody knew I'd left, nobody will know I'm back, la la la! Makes writing the wittering words much easier.

Back soon. 

Off to make an apple crumble, which is a very comforting thing to do on a wintry afternoon, don't you think?