Lovejoy

I am now selling antiques.

I'm not quite sure how this happened, but an earlier joke about becoming the Lovejoy of bookselling has turned out to be remarkably prescient.

(I read somewhere that Lovejoy has been shown in 127 countries, however if you are from Iran and haven't seen the pirated Farsi-dubbed DVDs, I should explain that he is a fashion icon and widely-respected specialist in antiquties, whose chaste courtship with a woman called Lady Jane would surely appeal to even the most conservative clerics.)

I fully intended to stick to books - that's what I know about - but when I saw a set of Edwardian chairs on sale for £40 on eBay, I couldn't resist and made a winning bid, with only seconds to go.

I wish the chairs weren't in Devon - 320 miles seems a long way to travel in one day, but I'm convinced that I can make a decent mark-up if I ensure that the chairs are well-photographed and the auction ends on a weekend evening (when many potential buyers will have had a few drinks).

Even if I don't make any money, the chairs will have served their purpose by making me realise that there's no earthly reason why I have to stick to books. I can sell anything I like, as long as I make a profit.

Indeed, earlier in the week, I contemplated emailing the person who's designing my logo and getting them to scrap the word 'books'.

But just as I was losing any faith in getting some stock, the phone rang. It was a man who'd just seen an advert I'd placed in a local paper: would I be interested in buying some military history books?

I scribbled down the address and agreed to drive over the following morning.

The next day, as I rang the bell of a stranger's house in a town I'd never been to before, I wondered what to expect. An older man opened the door and asked me to remove my shoes and go upstairs. I quickly checked the number to make sure that I had the right house (after an embarrassing incident where I unwittingly turned up to someone else's massage appointment).

It was the right place.

I was led into a bedroom which, to my relief, had several boxes of books. My heart sank when I saw a pile of short story anthologies (they're impossible to sell), but some of the other titles were more promising.

I'd been worrying about how to agree on a price - I hate haggling - and made what I thought was a fair offer. He accepted it immediately, which made me wonder if I could have got away with less. But although I need to make a living, I don't want to rip people off. There has to be an honourable compromise.

I now have 38 books, plus a kind donation from the Poet Laura-eate, bringing the total inventory to 42 titles. That's about 0.5% of the total I need to achieve what my old boss James Heneage always used to refer to as 'critical mass'.

It's going to be a long, hard slog.

October is the Cruelest Month

It's ironic that now I have all the time in the world to write, my blogging has almost ground to a halt. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd imagined writing posts about the progress of 'Steerforth Books' and my first steps in the precarious world of self-employment.

Sadly, the last four weeks have been a bit of a disaster. Within 24 hours of leaving my job, everyone in the Steerforth household succumbed to the horrible Norovirus, which had the one redeeming feature of rapid weight loss.

At times I felt as if I'd made a terrible mistake. Lying in bed, surrounded by people making zombie-like groaning noises, I couldn't help looking back fondly to the ordered world of my last job. Perhaps I had just made one of the most stupid decisions of my life.

In the end I wrote a list of the positives and negatives of my last job. There were two positives: the books and some of the people. The negatives were everything else. Suddenly everything seemed much clearer.

It's just as well that I felt reasonably sure about my move, as the month didn't get any better. Bits of the house collapsed, someone died and both of my sons succumbed to further illnesses.

As for Steerforth Books, it was just a name. I had no stock to sell, thanks to my former managing director's last minute intervention.

It would be easy to become despondent, but I'm fairly sanguine. There are times when it pays to be a pessimist and before I handed my notice in, I made sure that my business plan could survive a number of setbacks (including a mean-spirited former employer). I knew that it could take months to get Steerforth Books off the ground and planned accordingly, so it's not over yet.

I will be glad to see the back of October, but it hasn't been completely dreadful. I've been enjoying Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece 'Life and Fate', watching some long-forgotten British films of the 1960s and trying to become a domestic god, with mixed results. I also had a very pleasant evening out at the Lewes Arms with two fellow bloggers.

In some ways it's not a bad life, but even if I could afford to never work again, I don't think I'd change my plans. I really miss working with books.

I particularly love being surrounded by old books and sometimes feel as if I am in the literary equivalent of a telephone exchange, connected by invisible skeins to the lives of strangers. However great or absurd the titles are, they have furnished both rooms and minds. My passion, I suppose, is to try and find them new owners.

So the plan for the rest of the year is simple: fix the ceiling and get some books. Now that I've come clean about my lack of progress, perhaps I'll also write some more blog posts - there are recent discoveries that I want to share.

All at Sea

This morning I found a home for 'Steerforth Books': a small unit within a converted agricultural outbuilding, owned by a gentleman farmer called Peter*.

I had wanted somewhere in Lewes, but this option makes much more financial sense for the time being. The rent is very reasonable and if my business turns out to be an unmitigated disaster, I only have to give a month's notice.

I suppose that I should have visited lots of properties and carefully weighed up the options, but what's the point? I liked the office and I liked Peter. Also, with only three weeks left before I leave the comfortable world of paid employment, I need to get cracking.

I'll hopefully take possession of the unit next week and my first priority will be to install shelving for up to 10,000 books. I had thought of doing the shelves myself, but I've no desire to suffer the same fate as the French composer Alkan, who was killed by a falling bookcase. I think I'll ask an expert.

After the shelving, I need to sort out internet access, buy some desks and chairs and set up seller accounts on marketplaces like Amazon. Once that's done, I can start ordering the stock. None of this will feel real until I actually have some books.

At some point during the next few months, I'll also launch a website. I've been think of a logo and have scoured the internet for images of the original Steerforth from David Copperfield, but this was all I can find:


Steerforth all at sea? I'm not sure if it sends out the right signals.

Does anyone have any bright ideas for a logo or accompanying font? Most of my stock will be general titles from the 20th and late 19th centuries, with a few rare and antiquarian books thrown in. I certainly won't be 'high end', but I don't want to look like the bargain basement either.

What sort of things would you find reassuring or attractive as a buyer if you stumbled across Steerforth Books on the internet?

I'm resigned to opening a Twitter account, wading through the tedium of Google analytics and possibly beginning a new Facebook page (although I think that Facebook has 'jumped the shark').

Failing that, I could go viral with a book-related video on YouTube. 'Happy slapping' is so last decade, so perhaps a flashmob in the reading room of the British Library, or my five-year-old son and his friends dressing up in their Fireman Sam outfits and recreating 'Fahrenheit 451' would grab some attention? I'm not convinced.

Maybe I should just stick to selling good books at a slightly cheaper price than everyone else, wrap them in decent packaging and make sure that they're posted promptly?

Anyway, any suggestions would be much appreciated.

* NB - By 'gentleman farmer', I mean a farmer who is a gentleman, not a man of leisure who dabbles in farming.