Confessions of a Bookseller - by Shaun Bythell

About the Book

Book Synopsis

One cozy, funny year with a Scottish used bookseller as he stays afloat while managing staff, customers, and life in the village of Wigtown. This endearing world is the next best thing to visiting your favorite bookstore (shop cat not included).

Inside a Georgian townhouse on the Wigtown highroad, jammed with more than 100,000 books and a portly cat named Captain, Shaun Bythell manages the daily ups and downs of running Scotland's largest used bookshop with a sharp eye and even sharper wit. His account of one year behind the counter is something no book lover should miss.

Shaun copes with eccentric staff, tallies up the day's orders, drives to distant houses to buy private libraries, and meditates on the nature of life and independent bookstores ("There really does seem to be a serendipity about bookshops, not just with finding books you never knew existed, or that you've been searching for, but with people too.").

Confessions of a Bookseller is a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books. It's for any reader looking for the kind of friend you meet in a bookstore.

Review Quotes

Praise for Confessions of a Bookseller and Shaun Bythell

"Bythell's wicked pen and keen eye for the absurd recall what comic Ricky Gervais might say if he ran a bookshop."
--Wall Street Journal

"Something of Bythell's curmudgeonly charm may be glimpsed in the slogan he scribbles on his shop's blackboard: 'Avoid social interaction: always carry a book.' "
--Washington Post

"Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny..."
--Daily Mail

"Bythell is a skillful writer . . . he creates a full, appealing world populated with colorful characters. The Scottish landscape--geese flying over the salt marsh, the meandering river where he likes to fish--is gorgeous . . . an endearing and thoughtful book."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I've ever read."
--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"...amusing and often cantankerous stories [that] bibliophiles will delight in, and occasionally wince at..."
--Publishers Weekly

"Bythell writes with biting humor . . . he is a man on a mission, and a year seen through his eyes convinces the reader that is a mission worthy of undertaking."
--Chicago Tribune

"An enveloping account from the front lines of an industry in flux."
--Foreword

"Bythell remains an unwavering correspondent whose daily rambles reminds us of the joy in real bookshops."
--Fine Books & Collections Magazine

"A bookseller in Wigtown, Scotland, recounts a year in his life as a small-town dealer of secondhand books....Irascibly droll and sometimes elegiac, this is an engaging account of bookstore life from the vanishing front lines of the brick-and-mortar retail industry. Bighearted, sobering, and humane."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Bythell's witty descriptions of cheap customers, the drudgery and comfort of his daily routines and the consistent weather manages to create a sense of place strong enough to capture my flittery mind for long enough to feel settled-in near his fire."
--Portland Herald Press