WIGTOWN, Scotland: Isak Dinesen had a farm in Africa. Recently, if only for a day, I had a bookstore in Scotland.
It wasn’t easy to get to Wigtown, in the remote Dumfries and Galloway region of Scotland, in time for my shift. Though the village is only a two-hour drive from Glasgow, a GPS sent me through 53km of the desolately beautiful Galloway Forest Park on a single-track road that rattled the nerves.
The nerve rattling was compounded because I was driving on the “wrong” side of the road and with a stick shift installed on my left rather than my right. This felt like trying to use a mortar and pestle with my good arm tied behind my back. While in oncoming traffic.
It is worth getting to Wigtown, population 1,000, however. It is lush and green and smells of the nearby sea. It is Scotland’s national book town, its Hay-on-Wye. With a dozen used bookstores tucked into its small downtown, it is a literary traveller’s Elysium.
Best of all, Wigtown offers a literary experience unlike any other I’m aware of. In town there is a good used bookstore called the Open Book, with an apartment up above, that’s rentable by the week. Once you move in, the shop is yours to run as you see fit.
I was handed the keys and a cash box. I was told I could reshelve and redecorate. I could invite Elena Ferrante and Thomas Pynchon to speak, and Sly Stone to play, if I could find them.
The Open Book is run by a non-profit group. It has touched a chord with so many people, from every continent, that it’s booked through 2021, which is as far as Airbnb will take reservations. There’s a waiting list after that. I managed to wedge myself in for a single night by begging and whining like a dog that’s lost a piece of andouille sausage under the refrigerator.
I opened the Open Book at 10am on a cool and overcast Monday in the spring, while nursing a generous hangover. For this I must blame Shaun Bythell, the shaggy-haired owner of Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop — helpfully, it is called the Bookshop — just down the street. He’d kept me up late the previous night. The Facebook page for Bythell’s shop prominently features an Amazon Kindle, mounted as if a deer head, that he blasted with a shotgun.
My first task as proprietor of the Open Book was one I hadn’t anticipated. What to write on the slate sandwich board that sits out front?
A favourite exhortation came to mind. With chalk I scrawled: “Read at whim! Read at whim! — Randall Jarrell.” For the opposite side, after a bit of puzzling, and given my physical and mental state, I shakily wrote: “Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink. — Barbara Pym.” I set my board outside.
First sales
It was time to get a look around. The Open Book is not entirely my kind of used bookstore in that its literature section is modest, dwarfed by the sections for miscellaneous subjects like birds and Scotland and garden design. But there was a nice shelf of Penguins under the register.
My first customers were a middle-aged couple who seemed to be casing the joint for a robbery. I felt sure they would mark me out instantly as an American interloper and groan, but they merely grunted hello and set to browsing.
After 10 minutes, the man brought two well-thumbed paperbacks to the register: Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novels ‘The Garden of Rama’ and ‘Rama II’.
My first sales! Together they were £8, roughly $10.50 (Dh38.65). I vaguely felt I should save the 10-pound note he handed me for framing. I made change from the cash box, noted the titles and prices in a spiral notebook left for that purpose, and my day had commenced.
I’ve worked in many bookstores in my life, and I hadn’t realised how much I missed them. It’s surprising what you learn, as if by osmosis, a daily mental steeping, about every possible subject.
Often you learn more than you want to know, when people bring to the register books about haemorrhoid care, loneliness or coping with the death of a child. To this day, when a young person asks me for advice about finding employment in the word business, I say (after telling them to read like lunatics): Work in a bookstore if you can find one, or a library, all through high school and college.
My second customer was a wiry and distraught-seeming woman who didn’t bother to acknowledge me as she entered. She seized upon an illustrated book titled ‘Shrubs and Climbers’ and bought it for £2.
After this, there was a drought. No customers for a half-hour or more. I sipped my coffee and stared out the window, as if scanning for tumbleweeds.
Then something excellent happened. A young couple, Beth Porter and Ben Please, arrived with their infant daughter, Molly. They had musical instruments in tow: Beth, a cello; Ben, a ukulele; Molly, a toy glockenspiel.
Porter and Please are the core members of the Bookshop Band. They write songs inspired by books and play them in bookstores. I’d met them the night before at Bythell’s apartment, which is above his store. They’d decided to welcome me to Wigtown by performing an impromptu concert.
All day, kind and eccentric locals popped in to say hello. One woman brought me shortbread. Others inquired worriedly about our US president, as if I might have a copy of the famous Russian tape.
Romantic dream
It was Jessica Fox’s idea to allow guests to stay in and operate The Open Book. She’s a US filmmaker who first arrived in Wigtown in 2008, possessed by the romantic dream of working in a used bookshop in Scotland.
She landed at Bythell’s store and the two fell in love. When word got out in 2013 that a local bookshop was going to close, she had a thought about what to do with it. Bythell’s parents purchased the shop, and they arranged for a small non-profit volunteer group to operate it. The Open Book is rentable for £28 (about $37) a night.
“I remember thinking to myself, I can’t be the only person who would love to run a bookshop by the sea,” Fox told me. The store was an almost instant success. For many visitors, running the shop is the fulfilment of a lifelong fantasy. Fox tries to accommodate people with special circumstances, such as life-threatening illnesses.
Fox and Bythell are no longer a couple but remain friends. She now lives in Edinburgh, but keeps a hand in the shop’s operation. She’s written a memoir, ‘Three Things You Need to Know about Rockets’, about her Wigtown experience.
Bythell has written his own memoir, ‘The Diary of a Bookseller’, which will be published in the United States this fall. It’s among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I’ve read. Sample line: “I am putting together a mental jigsaw of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.”
Though there were many browsers while I ran the shop, and as many as six people in the store at once, I sold only three books in the afternoon.
I did buy a small pile of books myself — so many that, when added to other books I’d bought while travelling, Norwegian Airlines charged me for overweight luggage flying home.
Before I closed up the shop, I pulled my sandwich board inside, locked the front door and dropped the keys through a slot. Mentally, I was making plans to run this place, in 2022 or 2023, for as long as they will allow me. With luck, Bythell will take me out for some Kindle-shooting.
