The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps – used stamps, I mean. Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them merely to order them was enough – it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money – stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later.
The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. When I worked in a second-hand bookshop – so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios – the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.
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