Book Review: The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Imagine reading the work diary of someone whose job follows a regular pattern each day, doing the same general activities, and that’s basically what reading this book was like - with some humorous anecdotes thrown in!

“An elderly customer told me that her book club’s next book was Dracula, but she couldn’t remember what he’d written.”

The Diary of a Bookseller is comprised of a year of diary entries from secondhand book shop owner, Shaun Bythell. And I have to admit, learning about how a secondhand book shop is actually run was very eye-opening to me, as it’s not really something I had considered before!

Each day the amount of money made through sales is recorded and it was so interesting to see this change from day to day, season to season. Takings were abysmal for quite a few of the winter months, whereas foot traffic and sales would go way up in the summer and tourist months. Bythell does have a lot of hatred for amazon, which is understandable, but at times it just wore me down. Although I will say that I am now making even more of a conscious effort to not just buy my books there!

Speaking of the bookseller himself, he was a large part of the reason why I didn’t enjoy this as much as I expected to. He just wasn’t very likeable to me. I have quite a dry wit myself, but often times I just found him to be kinda rude. Did not like.

However, I gotta say that the short diary entries were a heaven-send as my focus was absolutely terrible the week I was reading this, so a diary format that I could I dip in and out of suited my attention span.

It was an okay read, some of the anecdotes were funny as you see what an eclectic mix of customers he has, but I was ultimately a little disappointed! 2.5 stars.

Johann

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