Cold Comfort Farms

Ten years ago, I was working on a farm in the middle of a cold Sussex winter, trying to push some huge metal wheelie bins up an ice-covered slope. After falling over several times, I gripped onto the bins as firmly as possible, only to discover that my hands had stuck to the freezing metal. It was not the best of times.

There were lighter moments. Occasionally, we'd stop for a cup of tea and see how long it took for the dregs of our cups to freeze once we'd tipped them on the ground. Meanwhile, in a nearby barn, some mice had taken the used teabags from our makeshift bin and turned them into a cosy little nest. 

I barely knew the people I worked with, but the grim, Siberian labour camp conditions created a sort of camaraderie.

When friends asked me what I was doing, I told them a half truth: I was setting up an online secondhand bookselling business, with a man called Pete. If they wanted to imagine a rarefied atmosphere of antiquarian books, that was fine with me. The reality was harder to explain and I'm not sure I even understood it myself.

It had all happened by chance. A few weeks earlier, I'd been approached by someone I vaguely knew who'd heard that I'd recently left an online bookselling job to set up my own business. Pete invited me to a local pub and, over a pint of Harvey's, produced a succession of Excel spreadsheets that showed how the two of us could make our fortune. My bookselling experience combined with his business acumen would be, he argued, be a winning combination. 

I wasn't convinced, but it was flattering to be asked and, after all, what did I have to lose? Pete proposed that we ran two separate, but linked, businesses, so I would still have the independence I needed, but with a guaranteed supply of books. I mulled it over that evening and said yes the following morning. 

The farm was 10 miles away, in the middle of the Sussex countryside and was owned by a gypsy family. For reasons I never fully understood, they all seemed to be called Billy and lived in a static home which was occasionally turned 90 degrees to the right or left, perhaps as a homage to their nomadic past.

Pete had sublet a barn from the family and had established a small business selling penny paperbacks, but had no idea what to do with all of the older, non-barcoded books. My role was to go through the stock, sort out the wheat from the chaff and find a way of selling the books online. I'd already done this in my previous job, so what could possibly go wrong? 

I soon had my answer. Several weeks of sifting through books ridden with mouse droppings in subzero temperatures took its toll and I developed pneumonia. I hadn't taken it that seriously until I saw the look on my doctor's face after she'd tested my lung capacity. It was time to stop. The rest of February was a write-off, spent mostly in bed.

By the beginning of March, I felt able to go back to work and found Pete in an ebullient mood. He had just bought a large van, which meant that we could move our stock around between different premises. All I had to do now was find a suitable location for my part of the business. 

How did one go about finding suitable properties to set up an internet bookselling business? I had no idea, but like any sensible person I tried Google and eventually found this.

After my spell in the icy gulag, the new site felt like paradise. The owner was a gentleman farmer whose wife ran a B&B for visitors to Glyndebourne and his other tenants included the official glovemaker to the Queen. Every time I opened the door, I felt of rush of pleasure as I looked at the view:

I could have quite happily spent my days sitting in this empty building, just looking at the view and listening to music. If only such jobs existed. Sadly there was rent to pay, so I had to start focusing on the nuts and bolts of the business. Literally:

It took two weeks to assemble the giant Meccano sets masquerading as shelving units, one nut and bolt at a time. It was indescribably tedious and if someone had told me that I'd have to disassemble it and reassemble it somewhere else, six months later, I might have felt like giving up.

Along with the shelving, there was the other minutiae to consider: postage, computers, printers, furniture, setting up a BT account, banking and stationery. Even something as simple as a packing slip required HTML skills that were way beyond my abilities, but somehow I had to learn. Gradually, it was beginning to take shape, but there was one thing missing: staff.

Fast forward to a month later and it was impossibly idyllic. I was working in a beautiful rural setting with two postgrads and a member of the cast of The Archers, which added to the bucolic atmosphere. We spent our days sorting through old books in a cosy little office, accompanied by the soothing strains of a French classical music station. What more could anyone want?

Sadly, it was too good to last. Our business generated a lot of waste and our landlord had made it very clear that he didn't want his B&B guests disturbed by the sight of wheelie bins, or woken up by any early morning waste collections. I couldn't argue with that. If I was in the land of Nod after a night's Gotterdammerunging, I wouldn't want a dawn chorus of "ATTENTION! THIS VEHICLE IS REVERSING!"

So far, I'd managed to use Pete's van to take our unwanted books away, but that took two hours out of my day. Also, Pete's bargain van was rather erratic and, without any warning, things would suddenly stop working. On one occasion, I was driving to a warehouse in Birmingham and discovered that the windscreen wipers weren't functioning. I pulled over and texted Pete:

"Got to turn back. The wipers aren't working." 

Pete quickly replied: "Is it raining?" I replied that it wasn't, but it might start raining at some point in the journey, in which case I'd be in a bit of a pickle. I think Pete thought that I was being an old fuss-pot.

The business model was simple enough. We received bulk deliveries of old, pre-ISBN books and sorted through them, identifying any titles that might be worth selling. It doesn't take long to learn which books have no value at all in the secondhand market - things like everyday bibles, old textbooks and Victorian poetry anthologies, or titles like Little Women, Reach For the Sky and anything by Walter Scott. 

Sadly, these books are sent off to be pulped as nobody wants them, particularly the charities who have just sold them to us as a waste product. If the books have nice covers, they may have a future lining the shelves of some faux olde worlde pub, but most will end up in places as unlikely as road surfacing material. In a normal one tonne delivery, anything up to 90% of the books end up being thrown away.

I resisted leaving my rural idyll for as long as possible, but I had to face facts: the business was generating too much waste for our genteel setting. I had to find a new home for the books. After a few fruitless weeks of searching online, I found this:

It was as grim as it looks in the photo, but it was big and cheap - perfect for a growing business. We could have as many wheelie bins as we liked and receive deliveries from articulated lorries. However, expecting my staff to work in a large barn, particularly as the weather got colder, was asking too much. How could I provide them with a decent office space?

Fortunately, I had a brainwave:

I won't claim that my garden shed idea matched the splendour of our previous office, but once I'd installed decent lighting, a couple of heaters and painted the inside a bright colour, it was tolerable. Perhaps we might have been contented there, but unfortunately things took a turn for the worse.

Impressed by the size of the barn, Pete decided that he'd like to set up a little sideline there and employed the first four Polish men who responded to his Gumtree advert. They were perfectly pleasant individuals, but had a penchant for drinking vodka in the morning. Once Pawel and his chums had reached a suitable state of inebriation, they would amuse themselves by performing stunts with a forklift truck (those things can move a lot faster than you might imagine). Occasionally, the forklift would almost crash into our office, veering off seconds before impact. 

To add insult to injury, they played Heart FM and, on one occasion, I had to listen to Adele  accompanied by the cry of a bull being sodomised by one of its stablemates in an adjacent barn. It was at moments like this, I wondered where I had gone wrong.

But in spite of my reservations, the business worked. The sales slowly but steadily grew as we added books to our inventory and received orders from all over the world. Having a global marketplace meant that even the most obscure book stood a reasonable chance of finding a buyer. In a bookshop, I strongly doubt that our 1920s book about UHT milk production would have sold, but online we found someone in Uruguay who couldn't wait to read it.

After a year, I thought I'd developed a pretty good business model. The overheads were low and the turnover was growing month by month. But I hadn't foreseen that there would be a number of obstacles to our progress. Here are five of the worst:

1. Animals

Being a townie, I was under the naive impression that we were the sole occupants of our barn, but I soon learned otherwise. From a robin's point of view, our bookshelves were just a suitable place to build a nest.

When the eggs hatched, we had to tread very carefully, hoping that we wouldn't frighten the mother away from feeding her birds. This meant that if any poor soul ordered a book near the nest, I had to cancel the order. Of course, I couldn't tell them why, so I had to invent a vaguely plausible excuse and hope that our rating wouldn't suffer.

After a few weeks, the birds flew away, leaving several pecked, soiled books as a souvenir of their visit.

The poor Poles who worked in the open barn also had to contend with birds defecating on their computer monitors and keyboards, which must have added insult to injury. 

In addition to birds, we shared our barn with amphibians:

But the most bizarre moment was when we saw a mink casually walk past with a rat in its mouth. The moment it noticed us, the mink jumped and let go of the rat. Seeing an opportunity, the rat scuttled off into a narrow gap by the door and hid. When we returned after the weekend, we found the mink lying dead with its legs in the air. Next to it, was a huge pile of rat droppings.

Our uninvited guests may have thrown the occasional spanner in the works, but overall they provided many comedic moments and I grew to love the absurdity of it. I also cherished the moments when a robin would land a few feet away and patiently watch me unpack my deliveries. Perhaps he was hoping for a bookworm.

2. Couriers

I thought I'd set up a foolproof system. Rather than faffing around taking parcels to the nearest post office, I'd found a courier who would do all the hard work. All we had to do was put the UK orders in one mailsack and international orders in the other, then someone would come and collect them. It all worked very well until the day nobody turned up. 

After a number of unanswered phone calls, I discovered that the company had gone bust. They had several days' worth of our orders in their warehouse and for the next few weeks, I began each day issuing refunds and apologising to angry customers. Our rating dropped as a result and fewer orders came in, which was probably just as well, as there was nobody to collect them. 

I learned my lesson and signed up to one of the biggest couriers in the country. They went bust too.

3. Gravity

For no discernible reason, our Meccano shelving units would occasionally collapse under the strain of our growing inventory of books. The metal would buckle to the point where repairs were impossible. It was very annoying.

Gravity also nearly led to my premature demise when this teetering pile of boxes was delivered. 

It looks harmless enough here, but when this half tonne pallet was five feet above me on the back of a lorry, wobbling menacingly, I wasn't terribly happy about it. The delivery driver didn't inspire confidence when he said, "Looks as if it might fall off, mate. Can you stand underneath and try and keep it steady?" Like a fool, I complied because I wanted to show that I was also a proper man, just like him.

4. Suppliers

Like couriers, suppliers can suddenly go into receivership without any warning. Even if that doesn't happen, they may decide that my few hundred quid a month isn't enough of an incentive for them to bother separating their old books from the new, preferring to sell them to a waste paper merchant.

5. Partnership

Business partnerships are tricky at the best of times. Pete and I were like Del Boy and Rodney. Pete was a geezer and although I liked him personally, I didn't agree with the way he avoided paying people to extend his credit. Occasionally, his 'entrepreneurial' approach would land him in deep water and more than once his business teetered on the brink of disaster.

I was definitely a Rodney. I used to worry if I was a day late with my payments and liked to do everything by the book.

Eventually, Pete and I reached an amicable separation, but continued to help each other out and share premises.

Without Pete's quest for global domination, I no longer felt under pressure to expand and decided to continue as a one-man operation. The business was at a level where it ticked over nicely and I was contented sitting in my small office, listening to music, sorting through the random selection of books that passed through my hands.

The job was a strange mixture. One part of it involved sitting in a warm, cosy office, listening to Bach and looking at antiquarian books. The other involved mundane manual tasks, like trying to push heavy wheelie bins through the muddy surface of a farmyard. The physicality of the work could be particularly draining - if you've ever had to load and unload one and a half tonnes of boxed books, you'll know what I mean.

But although the chores could be repetitive, the books themselves were endlessly fascinating, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Although most of the stock was rubbish, literally, a delivery could yield all sorts of surprises, from a signed first edition by Siegfried Sassoon to a letter written by Paul Nash. 

If things had gone as planned, I'd probably still be in my cowshed now, assailed by weasels, toads and robins. However, a few years ago, my wife won funding from the local authority for our son to go to a school that specialised in teaching autistic children. As I was the only one who could take him there (and be on call to collect him if he had a wobble), my wife and I decided that we should swap roles. I tried to continue running my business on a part-time basis, but it didn't work and I very reluctantly said a final farewell to bookselling. 

Five years on, I am still at home, bored senseless and doing a terrible job at running the house, while my wife is developing a blossoming career as a freelance editor. Sometimes I fantasize about resurrecting Steerforth Books, even if it meant having to start from scratch again. But whenever nostalgia strikes, I remember the darker side of the job: the mud, the Heart FM, the near-death incidents, the rats and the back-breaking deliveries. 

And it still isn't enough to put me off. 

 

The Best of Times

It's exactly ten years since the bookshop company I worked for - Ottakar's - was taken over HMV Media, who incorporated the shops into its Waterstone's chain. I was happy at Ottakar's. It was a company that valued individuality, not only tolerating the quirky and eccentric, but actively encouraging it. Ottakar's and I were a good fit.

The company culture came from its founder and managing director, James Heneage - a man who was the antithesis of the grey-suited businessman. Fiercely intelligent and disarmingly honest, he had an unusual background. Expelled from a famous public school, he went on to join the army at Sandhurst and was allegedly responsible for the only mutiny in his regiment's history, when he got his soldiers lost in a jungle.

I suspect that many of the anecdotes about James were apocryphal, but it wouldn't have surprised me if they were true. James was a larger than life character, with a clipped military voice that boomed across the room. During a visit to one shop in early December, James was dismayed to find that there were no Christmas decorations and bellowed at the manager "What are you? Some sort of Calvinist?!"

But underneath the bluff exterior, there was a great warmth and we all felt that he was on our side. I have met many politicians, actors, writers and artists, but few of them have had the charisma that James Heneage possessed. He was a natural leader.

I enjoyed the job because in addition to the mundane business of running a shop, I had the opportunity to hold events, write articles about authors and meet a variety of people at launch parties. Sometimes the encouters were quite surreal: a conversation about NCP car parks with Lee Child, meeting John Grisham in a medieval hall that looked like something out of Hogwarts, dancing with a very drunk Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, meeting a True Crime author who told me that he could kill me with his bare hands if he wasn't a Buddhist, discussing the book trade with Jacqueline Wilson whilst sitting on a merry-go-round, advising Katie Price what she and Peter Andre should read in bed together...it was all very amusing.

I also worked with some lovely people - bright, unpretentious, full of fun, mostly. Most of the staff went on to greater things, but a few would have struggled to find employment anywhere else; for example, one member of staff liked watching DVD boxed sets of Apollo landings in real time and also had a collection of music by Nazi swing bands (one dance hit was called 'Bomb England'), but they loved their books and were a real assett to the business.

When the company was taken over, the new owners said how much they valued our 'passion' and wanted to incorporate it into the wider business, but within a year my job had turned into a very dull admin role, with all of the important decisions made elsewhere. After 18 unhappy months, I decided to leave Waterstone's before they left me.

But rather than dwell on sad endings, here's a small celebration of what I loved about Ottakar's:

Partly out of devilment, but also in an attempt to boost sales, I held an event featuring dangerous and exotic animals during the school holidays. In hindsight, it could have ended badly, but luckily it passed without a hitch. This woman has a rather useless chameleon on her arm. Why hasn't it turned blue?

In this photo, I'm holding a tarantula, wondering what will happen it it jumps off and runs away.

The Science Museum decided that their existing bookshop was too dull and asked Ottakar's to come in and make it more 'visitor friendly'. Less charitable souls might say that we took a good academic bookshop and dumbed it down, but it went down very well with the Museum and I really enjoyed the challenge of setting up a shop in such a unique envionment.

I'm not sure if the Museum realised how little we knew about science - we were completely winging it - but I think we got away with it.

I was very flattered when James Heneage told me that I was the ideal man for the job, possessing the necessary tact and diplomacy to deal with the museum authorities. Later I discovered that four people had turned the position down before I was offered it.

We had to work with the existing fixtures and fittings, all of which were very drab, but managed to come up with something half decent. Unfortunately, the director of the museum didn't like the illuminated sign, as he felt that the phrase 'Adult Books' had unfortunate associations.

An Ingmar Bergman moment from a lovely weekend in Sweden, courtesy of one of my ex-booksellers from the Clapham branch, who let us use her flat in Stockholm. As much as I love books, it's the people that I valued most about the job.

In the Crawley branch, we held the longest ever Jacqueline Wilson signing event, which lasted for eight hours. This photo doesn't do justice to the length of the queue.

Even the most jaded, world weary bookseller would be hard pressed not to be moved by an event like this. Jacqueline Wilson was wonderful and made every child feel as if they had a special bond with her. It was quite terrifying when it started, as I had no idea that so many people would turn up. When some very 'assertive' mothers started to surge forward, I had to act quickly to avoid a punch-up.

In Ottakar's the ethos was that quirky, interesting shops were good for business. Staff were encouraged to think of innovative ways to display and promote books, which made the job far more interesting for them. Every shop I worked in had at least one talented artist who produced the most astonishing windows.

In 2005, I had to open a shop in Worthing at the same time that my father was dying. It was a challenging time, but in many ways it helped having something to focus on. It was the first time I'd had the opportunity to recruit a team of staff from scratch, so I decided to follow my gut instinct and pick people I'd be happy to go to the pub with. The result was one of the happiest places I've worked in.

The set-up week involved converting a bare shell of a unit into a fully stocked shop with 25,000 books within five days. Every day we worked for up to 12 hours, then went out drinking. No matter lively the evening was, everyone was back the following morning at 8.00 sharp, which was quite remarkable in some cases.

The takeover of Ottakar's wasn't a certainty. The bid had been referred to the Monopolies Commission and we spent the best part of a year wondering what our fate was going to be. But on a Monday morning at the beginning of July, I turned on my PC and saw an email that read 'Welcome to Waterstone's'.

My heart sank.

If I ever come into a small fortune, I will revive a branch of Ottakar's just for the fun of it. I suppose the name is copyrighted, so keep an eye out for a bookshop called Ottokers, O.T.Takars or Otto Kerr's.

Table Talk

Yesterday evening, my wife arrived home with a new tablecloth.

"I expect you won't like it," she said. "I just wanted something cheery. It reminds me of a French cafe."

I looked at the garish colours and tried to imagine eating over it. "I'm sorry, but it's utterly hideous."

"Well, I think it's lovely." The door opened and my younger son entered the room. "Dad doesn't like this new tablecloth. What do you think?" A loaded question.

My son scrutinised it for a few seconds and I hoped that sanity would prevail. "Oh yes, it's beautiful."

I was outvoted and looked at the vile object, mocking me with its faux illustrations of food labels. Another nail in the coffin.

But during the night, one of our cats was sick on it. They have never vomitted on the table before, so I felt vindicated. Later I noticed that the tablecloth had been folded up and put away.

I felt sorry for my wife (but not sorry enough to take it out again) and resolved to think of something that might cheer her up. We all need treats, however small.

It was my birthday recently and I treated myself to two Jasper Conran shirts and eight novels. If that sounds self-indulgent, I should add that I still had change from a £20 note, as they'd all been bought in charity shops.

I love buying paperbacks in charity shops because the selection is completely unpredicatble. During the last month, I've read an ecclectic range of novels including Dead Man Leading by V.S. Pritchett, London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I particularly enjoyed the latter, as it seemed so chillingly apposite in light of the Donald Trump candidacy, showing how quickly democracy can be debased.

There seem to be certain types of people who work in charity shops and I keep seeing their doppelgängers wherever I go:

• a gay man in his 60s, usually wearing a bright, lambswool sweater
• a woman in her 50s who likes to talk
• a rough-looking man who is probably serving a community sentence
• a silent, terrified-looking girl in her late teens/early 20s
• a young man with learning difficulties
• an elderly woman who can't work the till 

They are a strange coalition of the retired, the marginalised and the disenfranchised. Uncelebrated and undervalued. When I saw a customer being rude to a charity shop worker, I wanted to remind her that she was talking to a volunteer.

I'm still selling books, in between domestic duties and childcare. I have around 7,000 books on sale, which generates a few dozen orders a week. Sadly, the gap between the overheads - postage and rent - and the total sales is narrowing, leaving me with a dilemma. Should I keep going in the hope that I can find a new supplier, or give up the ghost once the profits reach double figures?

Like Mr Micawber (surely one of the most annoying characters in literature) I'm sure that something will turn up.

In the meantime, here are a few photos from the last few weeks:

Lewes had a few misty mornings (as did most places, I believe). Somehow, black and white seemed right for this picture.

I took my sons to the Bluebell Railway the other day. In a masterstroke of frugality, I discovered that platform tickets were only £3 for adults and £1.50 for children, as opposed to £45.40 for a ride on a train. My younger son said he'd happily forgo the ride for a lolly. My older son said that steam trains were 'gay'.

While I was admiring the ingenuity of the Victorian engineering, my wife turned to me and said "I hope you're not turning into one of those odd men."

I must stop now and feed the cats. I've bought them two tins of Lily's Kitchen as a reward for bad behaviour.

Chaos Theory

This evening, my wife returned from her new publishing job and gave me a brief overview of the highlights of her working day. I half listened, until she mentioned that 200 envelopes had been returned to her workplace by the Post Office:

"They contained catalogues that we'd posted to bookshops. They were sent back because none of those shops exist any more."

I'd become used to the slow process of attrition that has seen the number of British bookshops halve in seven years, but the image of the 200 returned catalogues really hit home. I wondered what the booksellers who'd worked in those shops were doing now.

For their sake, I hope that none of them ended up in the bookshop I visited today: a sorry affair that has crossed the line from eccentricity to neglect, with piles of unsorted stock, shelves that appear on the verge of collapse and an all-pervading smell of body odour and stale tobacco.

In one section, an elderly man with a respiratory problem rummaged through a pile of Pan paperbacks, pausing only to glare at me and mark his territory with extended elbows. In another, a sparrow-faced woman in her 60s looked nervously at me, as if I was about to perform an indecent act. I tried moving to a different floor, but heard a man chanting "Mmm...umm...hmph...mee..." and made a swift exit.

This was bookishness in the worst sense of the word: dysfunctional, misanthropic and obsessive. I wondered what the staff thought of their clientele, before I realised that some of the customers were the booksellers. But experience has taught me that when I find myself repulsed by something, it is often a smokescreen for something I see in myself. Perhaps I still might become the wheezy old man who smells of stale cake and uses his elbows to deter others.

It seems perverse that this bookshop has survived while far better ones have gone to the wall, but I suspect that its overheads are fairly low and that the building is owned rather than leased. The stock itself is reasonably good and it seems a pity that so much of it is inaccessible. I saw a lot of dead stock obscuring the more sellable titles.

I can feel a quest coming on. If anyone can recommend a decent secondhand bookshop in the south of England (or beyond, as I want to travel around the UK this year), with a good selection of paperback novels, I'd really appreciate it.

Acceptance

It's eight years since I worked in a bookshop at Christmas, but even now a split second of 'Let it Snow' makes me flinch like a dog that has been kicked too many times. It's too late to change. Nineteen Christmases in bookselling have reduced my festive spirit to a shrivelled husk. Why did I do it?

On reflection, my relationship with bookselling has mirrored Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's model for the five stages of grieving:

1. Denial: This is just a temporary expedient while I find something that is more suited to my talents.

2. Anger: It's been two years now. I'm skint and I still have no idea what to do with my life.

3. Bargaining: While I'm here, I may as well apply for that floor mananger job in Kingston.

4. Depression: I've just turned 30 and I'm still working in a bookshop. What a loser.

5. Acceptance: Actually, there are worse jobs than this. At least I'm a manager now. The pay is better, the work can be interesting and most of my colleagues are lovely people.

As time went on I began to appreciate my work far more, particularly when I worked for Ottakar's. How many other jobs would have given me the opportunity to discuss bedtime reading with Katie Price, or bemoan the state of the book trade with Jacqueline Wilson while sitting on a moving merry-go-round?

But the price for these precious moments was a heavy one: Christmas. I'm not just talking about the Phil Spector loop tapes, but also the sheer volume of books that had to be sold in November and December. It was exhausting.

Most branches of retail sensibly spread their sales across the year. However, in the book trade, 50% of the income is earned during the last ten weeks of the year and much of that money comes from a relatively small selection of bestsellers - usually hardbacks that consist of the following:

• Two ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, one of which will be by someone in Eastenders
• A sci-fi/fantasy novel by a man called Terry
• The new Patricia Cornwell thriller
• The Guinness Book of Records
• A biography of a very dull sportsperson/yachtswoman/commentator
• A quirky, humourous title that has taken everyone by surprise
• A Jamie Oliver cookery book
• A Nigella Lawson cookery book
• A tie-in with a television series on BBC1, usually presented by a man called David
• The Booker Prize winner, if it's by an author whose name is pronounceable
• A misery memoir of horrific child abuse - Happy Christmas!
• A beautiful children's pop-up book, handmade by Bolivian peasants earning 50p an hour
• A stocking filler about bodily functions
• The Friendship Book
   

These books will be given as presents and very few people will actually ever read them, but they are the bread and butter of the publishing industry, making the difference between profit and loss.

As a manager, I knew that my head was on the block. If I ran out of any bestselling titles, it was a big black mark. However, if I ordered too much stock and was still stuck with it on December 27th, I would also be in trouble.

In addition to the bestellers, there were plenty of other things that could go wrong and at some point in the early hours of the morning, I would often wake up and go through tedious lists in my head:

• Did we have enough Book Tokens?
• Remember to increase the change float for the weekend.
• Find out if any of the weekend staff can cover if someone phones in sick.
• Don't forget to check that we have enough carrier bags.
• Get more of that bestelling pop-up book because it won't be reprinted before Christmas.
• Mustn't forget to refresh the window display.
• Tell X that they can't block the fire exit with boxes.
• Check last year's sales to see how many Jamie Olivers sold in the final week.
• Make sure the sale posters have arrived.
• Check WH Smith to see if they're selling Y for less than us.

What sort of person lies awake at night worrying about carrier bags? But like the nail that lost the kingdom in the famous nursery rhyme, their absence would spell disaster. And if we ran out of change, then harikiri was the only viable option.

The challenge of having to take five times as much money, unpack five times as many deliveries and have enough staff to cover these tasks (and the extended opening hours) was a daunting prospect, but I learned how to avoid the pitfalls and genuinely enjoyed the challenge and camaraderie.

 

I miss that moment on Christmas Eve, after the doors have finally closed, when you know that the madness is over for another year and that in spite of sickness, missing deliveries and dreadful weather, you've pulled it off. After wishing the staff a Happy Christmas, you walk around the empty shop and take stock (not literally, I hasten to add), looking at the books that surprised everyone by becoming bestsellers and those that were supposed to, but didn't.

Your 16-year-old self would probably be rather disappointed that you've ended up running a shop, but there's not much call for third-rate composers these days and after all, this is a bookshop. So many people would think that having a whole bookshop to yourself is heaven and suddenly, you realise that they're right.

Autumn Gold

I took some photos at work earlier today, as I thought the late afternoon light looked particularly appealing. For some reason, Google Plus has automatically tarted two of them up. I've no idea why and can't be bothered to find out.

My workplace isn't exactly glamorous, but even the most mundane features seem to acquire a strange beauty when the setting sun highlights the rough contours of the surfaces of buildings and objects:

I must bring a proper camera in one day and capture the post-apocalyptic splendour of my farm.

It has been an annoying week at work. A courier lost a bag of orders a few weeks ago - something I didn't discover until customers started emailing to ask where their books were. After a three week tour around the Midlands, the parcels were returned on Tuesday in a large box, along with a packet of 10,000 staples.

I think the staples were another mistake, rather than some form of recompense.

I have now switched to Royal Mail. They may have an online ordering system that makes the Enigma machine look simple, but at least I know that the books will reach their destination instead of sitting in a warehouse in Leicestershire.

I enjoy working in the countryside, but can't quite get over its oddness. On Monday a stranger asked me if I'd like to see his puppy (you could get arrested for that in London). He opened the back of a car and handed me a beautiful 13-week-old spaniel, with adoring eyes. Later, on the way home, I saw a man standing on the corner of a road with a falcon perched on his hand. I've no idea why.

On other days, I'll suddenly see a succession of people ride past in horse-drawn carriages, or spot someone casually carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight.

It's only a matter of time before I go native.

The Light That Failed

There are two parts to my job. One involves working in idyllic surroundings, with a view of the South Downs in the distance, listing quirky antiquarian books in a pleasant, weatherboarded office.

The other requires long periods of manual drudgery, sorting through huge deliveries of stock, trying to push rusting, back-breakingly heavy wheelie bins along muddy ground that feels like the shore of a tidal estuary.

Although they have lids, the bins still collect an extraordinary amount of rainwater and when I start to move them, they expel their brackish liquid from a small hole, like nervous sheep.

Next to the bins, there is a collection of odd machines, haphazardly mounted on planks. I have no idea what they are for:

During the last six months, I've watched the view from my workplace gradually change:

Autumn has clearly arrived and the late afternoon light is noticeably weaker. I now have to find my book orders by torchlight, as the solitary flourescent bulb barely makes an impression on the rows of shelves.

At the moment, I have a friend working with me. He has a regular role in a BBC radio soap opera, but when his character is going through a quiet period, he logs books with me.

I think he'd rather be acting, but it's good to have some company for a few days.

The temperature has been in the early 20s (or 70s, if you prefer) recently, but soon it will plummet and the books in the warehouse will feel like blocks of ice cream. I'm not looking forward to that. I can usually handle ten books before my fingers begin to seize up.

Yesterday I found a dead rat lying in a grass verge. I recoiled in horror and turned the other way, where I spotted a £1 coin lying on the ground. I lead a fairytale existence.

Locked in a Bookshop

A few days ago there was a minor Twitter frenzy, when a poor Texan tourist found himself locked in the Trafalgar branch of Waterstones, after it had closed for the day.

He tweeted: "Hi @waterstones I've been locked inside of your Trafalgar Square bookstore for 2 hours now. Please let me out."

Waterstones replied "Thanks for the tweets today! We'll be back at 9am tomorrow to answer your queries :) Happy reading!"

Fortunately, thanks to the power of social media, he was released within a few hours. If it had been 25 years ago, when I worked at Waterstone's, the poor man would have probably still been there the following morning.

It was a good story, but less unusual than people might think. I've locked people in a bookshop several times and I know that some of my former colleagues have too. It's more easily done than you might think.

On each occasion, we walked around the shop floor shouting that we were closing, then started turning the lights off, beginning at the top floor. This was usually a foolproof way of forcing people downstairs, like moths to the flame, until the only source of light would be the street lighting outside.

But sadly some people failed to take the hint.

One poor man was deaf and didn't hear the annoucement, but I still wonder why the darkness didn't make any impression on him. Another man was foreign and, perhaps, came from a country where unlit, empty shops were the norm.

(Thinking about it now, it was always men who got stuck in the shop)

Another time, some members of the criminal classes deliberately hid in the shop and went to a great deal of effort to open our safe, even making a hole in the wall behind it. They failed. If they'd succeeded, they would have found less than £1000 in cash.

Once we'd twigged that shouting and darkness weren't sufficient clues, we became more vigilant and no further incidents followed.

But to return to the locked Texan, during the Twitter storm, several people remarked how they'd love to be in an empty bookshop at night and I remembered the times when I took advantage of having the key to the shop.

Sometimes it was just enough to be able to browse without being disturbed by anyone. But I also remember dancing on the shop floor at midnight with some friends, playing my favourite tapes on the PA system at full volume and, on one occasion, walking around in my boxer shorts, just because I could.

In another branch, the manager and her staff would often go to the pub until closing time, then return to the shop for a pyjama party, during which more alcohol was consumed until everyone finally collapsed from exhaustion.

I've also heard that a few customer sofas have been the scene of some decidedly non-literary encounters between members of staff.

Of course, none of this could happen today. These days, shops have digital CCTV and sophisticated alarm systems, so dancing in the dark, noctural nudism, midnight couplings and sleepover sessions are no longer an option. Even entering the shop outside trading hours would probably count as gross misconduct. How sad.

On the plus side, if you want to get locked in a bookshop, you can now feel reasonably confident that you won't stumble on any safecrackers, copulating booksellers or midnight bacchanales, so it's probably a good time to try. Just head for an upopular section like poetry or transport and keep your head down.

Good luck.

P.S - Please check the opening hours. An absence of customers and staff is no longer an indication that the shop is actually closed.

Pond Life

I'm working ridiculously hard at the moment. If no further posts follow, then you'll know that I've either keeled over or been crushed to death by books.

I've been busy moving stock from my malodorous cowshed to a nice new unit, seven miles away, next to this pond:

The new unit is free of rats and mink. Also, I no longer have to cover the books in plastic sheeting to protect them from a growing family of robins. However, judging by a discovery someone made yesterday, the building isn't quite wildlife-free:

I'm not an expert on nature, but I believe that this is a great-crested newt. Quite why it decided to leave the splendour of the pond area for my new unit, I have no idea. 

Moving the stock is a fag (trivia fact - Jane Austen used this expression in 'Northanger Abbey'). I could hire a van and do it all in three trips, but that would be exhausting, so I'm transporting the books one car-load at a time. I've worked out that it will take 37 trips.

However, I think I'll have to bin some of the stock. The books that went on sale nearly two years ago seem to have reached the end of their shelf life and rarely appear on my list of titles sold. Is it really worth moving them?

These are the books that nobody seems to want:

I have no idea why 'A Romance in Radium' didn't excite the book buyers of the world. People have bought books about condensed milk, electricity substations and concrete, so nothing is too dull to sell. I think some books just drop off the radar.

Leisure time has been rather thin on the ground recently, but I was able to have a very enjoyable afternoon tea with a reader of this blog who happened to be on holiday in the UK. Meeting Dale and her husband was a delight and reinforced my positive view of blogging as a means of connecting with like-minded people. It could have been awkward meeting a complete stranger, but everyone I've met has been as likeable and entertaining as their writing, only more so.

On the subject of other bloggers, I'd like to thank Kristin at Not Intent on Arriving for inviting me to be interviewed on her blog. I hope I wasn't too dull. I like reading about Kristin's life (although it always makes me realise how dull mine has become) and vicariously enjoy reading about her travels.

My wife has just told me that a door has fallen off. I think that's my cue to stop.

The Downward Spiral

My book sales have been pretty awful recently. I'm not surprised, as I've felt too tired to do much since my appendix was whipped out, other than read Trollope and watch 'Breaking Bad'.

How long does it take to fully recover from surgery? My mother-in-law confidently asserted that it was one week per hour of surgery, but I'm not convinced.

This week I made a concerted effort to put some more books on sale. Fortunately, I've now reached a point where I have valued so many different titles, I can instantly identify the books that are of no value. This saves a lot of time, but the ratio of valuable to worthless books is still depressingly low.

If I open a box of random pre-ISBN books, I'm also certain that it will contain at least one copy of the following:

Little Women,
The Ascent of Everest
Heidi
Anything by Dickens
The Rose Annual
Variable Winds at Jalna, by Mazo de la Roche
Rogue Herries
The Pilgrim's Progress
A Famous Five book
A late Victorian 'penny dreadful', published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
What Katy Did
Over two dozen Companion Book Club/Readers' Union hardbacks
A 1920s title about book-keeping
The Wooden Horse
Popski's Private Army
A reference book published by Odhams

Something by or about George Bernard Shaw
Heute Abend! Book One
The Wind in the Willows

I could go on, but I'm sure you'd rather I didn't.

Any title that isn't familiar gives a little skip to the heart, particularly if it isn't published by Rupert Hart-Davis (for some reason, nearly all of their books are worthless). Perhaps this will be the book that pulls me back from the brink of penury. I type in the details and press enter. It is worth 61p.

But sometimes I am pleasantly surprised:

This signed first edition by the author of 'Goodbye Mr Chips' was a refreshing change from finding yet another novel by Storm Jameson and sold at auction for a couple of hundred quid.

Even on a bad day, I can usually rely on finding a title that will provide some harmless peurile amusement:

(I wonder if they have cottaging in the USA? I only ask because I once had a terrible time trying to explain the concept of a public toilet to a San Francisco cafe owner. He assured me that they didn't exist in America, but this seems unlikely.)

I was also amused by these covers:

I can only suppose that a 'slapper' was something different then, but I find it hard to believe that the book I found yesterday - a 1930s Encyclopaedia of Sex by someone called A. Willy - didn't raise a smirk in the publisher's office.

I also find titles that provide surprisingly pertinent information. For example, after my recent rant about house prices ruining the 'dreaming suburb' of Teddington, I came across this:

"In some London districts it is reckoned that more than one quarter of the inhabitants change their address each year."

That quote from a late Victorian book called 'The Problems of Poverty' by John Hobson reminded me that London's population has been in a constant state of flux since the Industrial Revolution and that the seemingly unchanging world of postwar Teddington was just a brief interlude.

However, although it's good to find titles that interest or amuse, I need to derive an income from my books. Every month I have to pay for stock, plus the rent, postage and commission fees. Whatever's left over is my wage. Last month it reached a new low.

Between recovering from an operation and dealing with a child with 'special needs' (I hate that phrase, but can't think of an alternative), it has been a struggle to deal with a backlog of work. This month, I hope to make up for lost time and perhaps in the process, I may find some more gems.

On the other hand, I may just find books like this:

If the bookselling doesn't work out, maybe I'll become a nylon pirate.