Shaun Bythell is a bookseller in Wigton, Scotland. He’s written a few books about his life selling books including one which I review here. His books are amusing and he adopts a grumpy persona for his narration with many complaints about the quirks of his customers. Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops is much of the same. It’s a short book which I listened to on audio and which was narrated by Peter Kenny, although as the book is written in the first person and the writer directly addresses the reader it feels like it is the author speaking to you personally.
The author groups and lists his customers and then describes their characteristics and habits. There are the ones that like to haggle over prices, those that want to sell their books and won’t accept his offers, those who browse all day and don’t ever buy anything, and those who regard his shop as free childcare and disappear leaving their offspring. There are also those who seek out the exotica, those who are experts and want to share what they know and those who are simply bores. I suspect that all these people exist but I am not sure how many of them there really are. In the end the author describes his normal or ideal customer but we suspect that he enjoys the non-normal and non-ideal ones as much as these.
This is fun for those of us who frequent bookshops and who can, therefore, identify some of these characteristics in ourselves or others.
Anne Is Reading 