The Uncensored Diary of a Bookseller — bookshop

“Did you ever hear about Aleister Crowley’s attempts to produce a literary bomb?” Rosencrantz lays across my counter, feigning relaxation, waiting for me to answer. Beside him, his ever present dogsbody Guildenstern is frothing at the mouth, hoping against hope that he’ll be allowed to deliver the punchline for once. “Its rumoured that he created a letter that would eradicate the brain of the reader during an act of black ritual magick,” Rosencrantz goes on. “The British government paid him to do it and send the letter to Hitler in early 1940. Unfortunately it was intercepted by Hess and the...

St John of God is the patron Saint of booksellers. He’s also the patron Saint of the mentally ill. That probably speaks volumes. The Book Buddha nods off behind a row of exquisite leather-bound folios across the hall from me. Another book fair with more book sellers than book buyers. Why do we put ourselves through this torture? Packing up boxes of books, driving across the country, only to be met with an indifferent and, often, non-existent audience. As you sit among a room of books, books for every conceivable taste, without a potential reader in sight, the terrible thought...

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”- Don Quixote (Cervantes) A fondness for dullness can be a dangerous thing. Particularly when you run a bookshop like mine. These bookshops are like light bulbs in the abyss for the mentally deranged. Don’t get me wrong – most of the people who visit our shop are beautiful souls; readers, book lovers, present hunters, browsers, writers, artists and thinkers. All wonderful and all welcome. But the bookshop, like all of its kind, also operates as a beacon for the...

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”- Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) In the mountains of the south, wedged between inbreeding and agriculture, lays the Graveyard of Irish Books. This is where your unwanted paperbacks come to await final verdict. The purgatory of the printed word. Where did you imagine all the books you donated to charity shops ended up? Where did you think your deceased fathers book collection, which he painstakingly assembled over decades, relocate to after you callously called in the house clearance crew? Where do the countless unsold local histories, vanity...

I have this strange fascination with books about bookshops. Maybe I think I’m going to learn some long-hidden trade secret which will keep me out of the clutches of financial dissolution for another few weeks, or maybe I’m trying to harmonise the romantic notions of bookselling presented in these guides with the real-world fight-or-flight state of the industry. Then I caught Covid and decided to record my own bookselling diary. An uncensored diary.Because, as much as I adore memoirs from notable booksellers like Shaun Bythell and Richard Booth, something about them seems to miss the wider meaning of what I...