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Friday 21 July 2017

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Diary of a stock mistress

Claudia FitzHerbert's weekly dispatch from a small Oxford bookshop.

How nice am I bound to be to people, how much of the time? I am referring here to non-book-buyers who come into the shop off the street in search of this and that. There is, I know, a school of thought which says a) you never can tell and b) you can always convert. This strikes me as seriously wrong-headed, even for a school. My experience suggests that you can always tell and you can never convert.

A couple of months ago we were given tickets to sell for a series of guitar concerts. A few regular customers splashed out on them, but not one of the hundreds of music-lovers directed to the bookshop by the musicians' website so much as glanced at the bookshelves when they came in for tickets. The closest any came even to acknowledging we were more than a ticket booth was to ask "How long have you been here?" with their noses in the air. (They weren't being snooty, just sniffing for curry. A restaurant called the Taj Mahal was once where we are now.)

Fair enough, I thought then. They were in the bookshop for a reason and the reason wasn't books. But I also thought it was a lesson in not taking things personally. I resolved, after that, to do my best to provide pens, pencils, directions, somewhere to pee, weep, hide, etc, without making anyone feel too uncomfortable about not buying books or even browsing the shelves.

But there is something about the woman who comes in asking for "one of those transparent plastic dustjackets which you slip on to paperbacks" that makes me pause in my smiling sainthood act. She has the pale and anxious look of the long-term sufferer from a hygiene disorder. I am seized by a mad, cruel impulse to reach out and stroke her with a handful of dust.

She may see something in my eye for, having asked the question, she turns away, declaring - "You don't understand."

"Oh, but I do," I say, and pluck a book called Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick from the shelf called "Secret Lives". This is a cleverly unspeculative account by Diane Atkinson of the union between a Victorian lawyer and minor man of letters and his scullery maid. They were a rum but loving pair - both liked nothing better than for her to lick the horse shit from his boots. I keep it next to Judith Flanders on The Victorian House, and do a steady trade in both.

More to the point, I had noticed, last time the Atkinson came in, that it arrived from the wholesalers in a plastic jacket of exactly the sort described by Hygiene Disorder. Whether this is the result of chance, a publisher's gimmick or packer's prank I neither knew nor cared. I had simply shelved the book with a dim sense of future usefulness, and here we were.

HD looks momentarily delighted. Then downcast. "Could I buy the cover on its own?" she asks, scanning the back of the book with an air of something like distress.

I say she can have the cover as long as she buys a book. Anything over a tenner, I add, greedily, suddenly fearful that she would go, as people do, for Flatland (£1.25).

I am distracted then by a scruffy student regular wanting to "borrow" the Cassell's Dictionary of Slang for a day or two. The cheek of it. When I turn back HD is still clutching Love and Dirt to her chest.

"So what's it to be? The Atkinson or something… cleaner?" is the bad joke which I can't help making.

"I haven't got £10," replies HD, laying out some coins on the counter.

"I'll settle for that" I say, counting out £4 exactly. I peel off the plastic cover and scan the shelves for a book to fit the bill. The choice, I begin to explain, is between a Penguin Great Idea or one of the historical lives for nippers published by Short Books.

HD shakes her head. "I don't want a book. I've got lots of books. Only I can't read any of them without -" She stops and looks at me pleadingly. Then, pulling herself together, she snatches up the plastic sheeting, shoves it into her bag and scuttles out of the shop.

"Never knowingly oversold, eh?" chuckles Cheeky, and settles down in the leather armchair with the newly naked Victorians.

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