The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
"It is a strange phenomenon that, when customers visit the shop for the first time, they tend to walk very slowly through it, as though they are expecting someone to tell them they have entered a forbidden zone, and when they decide to stop, it is invariably in a doorway. This, of course, is incredibly frustrating for anyone behind them, and since that person is usually me, I exist in a state of perpetual frustration. Anthropologists insist that it is an instinctive human response on entering a new space to stop and look around for potential danger, although quite what sort of danger might be lurking in a bookshop - other than a frustrated bookseller whose temper has been frayed to the point of violence by the fact that somebody is blocking the doorway - is a mystery."
Shaun Bythell's diary of a year of his observations as a second hand bookseller in little rural Wigtown, Scotland, is both hilarious and, for me as another person working retail, very relatable. He's a lovely mix between the misanthropic Bernard Black (from Black Books) and an exasperated Giles (from Buffy) which is just my kind of dry sense of humour.
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