In the eyes of the boss, they are both readers and "food and clothing parents" who take care of the business. During the pandemic last year, Sean Bethel, the owner of Scotland's largest second-hand bookstore, wrote about customers he had met because he missed them too much.
In The Seven Men of the Bookstore, Sean jokingly borrows the Linnaean system of taxonomy to divide these readers into seven categories: chattering literature professors, high-profile Versailles industry experts, young couples dragging their families, and idle retirees. He not only complained about some of the hateful and hateful points of readers, but also missed the strange stories of books and people, people and people meeting here.
Together, these stories give us a glimpse into life in the bookstore, as Sean himself put it, and although he tried his best to complain, he wanted to "miss them like old friends who have no news." Whether it's a charming and funny person, or a rude or rude person, I miss everyone immensely."
The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of The Seven Kinds of People in the Bookstore, "Genus: Peritus (Expert)", with the permission of the publisher.
Seven Kinds of People in the Bookstore, by Shaun Besser, translated by Yao Yao, lucida | Beijing United Publishing Company, September 2021.
Peritus, if your Latin is as bad as mine, then your guess that the word refers to some annoying place in Hades is entirely understandable. But that's not what it means. It means "expert".
In general, this type of customer is a self-proclaimed expert, and they often don't have a fixed audience to show off his or her ingenuity. Unlike most university faculty or recognized industry commentators, who give views that are often fact-based and knowledgeable, with students and readers waiting to hear what they say. And the experts to be talked about next, the vast majority of self-taught, they do not have such a hungry audience. But as always, there must be exceptions to everything, and among these people you can count some of the most considerate customers, and I am really lucky to meet them. And the rest, it's really annoying to tears.
Experts are more passionate about using super complex vocabulary, and short, lean language is enough. Philately became "philately," bird watching became "ornithology," and morbid obsession with insects became "entomology." It's like they're eating out, eating Will Selff as the main course, and then swallowing Jonathan Middles and Stephen Frye for dessert. The difference is that Cerf, Mides, and Fry have all swallowed, digested, and understood the entire Oxford Dictionary, and know exactly how to use the right vocabulary in the right places to make their prose clear. The experts, on the other hand, painfully plunged the reluctant audience into chaos, with nothing to marvel at. They know very little, at most five advanced words, but they use them in a big way, saying anything. As a result, the only function is to scrape the floating illusion of their intellectual superiority in one fell swoop. But my pharmacist friend Croda would say that long word obsession is not a reason to laugh at others, and some of you laugh at them without knowing that the chemical polyvinylpyrrolidone is a binding agent found in most prescription pills.
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway famously argued about the use of language, with Faulkner sneering that "no one has ever heard of Hemingway using a word that needs to be looked up in the dictionary." Hemingway's response was "mediocre Faulkner." Did he really think that lofty feelings came from complex words? I know the hard words as much as he does, but I prefer the old, plain words." As far as Hemingway's use of "we" was concerned, my English teacher at school would probably approve of Faulkner, and he would argue that "words" should not be followed by "they", only "a few words", or "many words". Similarly, he is quite pedantic in his treatment of the word "alternative". He insisted that the root of the word was derived from the Latin word "alter", referring to one of both, so there could be no plural form. So when two or more "alternatives" are proposed in class, it is always a great source of happiness for us.
Type 1: doctus (expert)
Stills from the British drama Black Bookstore (season 3).
There is no other reason for this type of person to step into a bookstore, just to give you a lesson at length and tell you what their professional interests are. If you don't know anything about the field, then they get a unique thrill — because you almost certainly don't understand it. Most booksellers who run professional books have gained a wealth of knowledge through years of accumulation, which is reflected in their collections. But if you run a popular bookstore (like me), you can't know everything. Still, for those who have dedicated their adult lives to studying the breeding habits of Siberian arboreal snails, you can honestly try this. When you reveal, no, that you have not heard of Michal Khosak's influential study on this subject, Mollusk Communities in Paleoecological Reconstruction: A Study of Their Predictive Power Using Transfer Function Models, they will mock you with an arrogant look, with undisguised joy and contempt (to a comparable degree). While these people will take pleasure in your ignorance of their area of expertise, they can't really understand why you or anyone else wouldn't want to spend twenty years living in a tent in the woods fifty miles away in Omsk, carrying a notebook and a microscope to detect snail feces, reading nothing but obscure academic papers related to the subject.
A very small number of such people, who are more socially adept, realize that others may not be able to share their incomprehensible interests. Thus, this small group of people gets the pleasure of substitution from another thing, and that is their fascination with the ecological niche. The hobby was somewhat different, and it led them to mistakenly think they looked more interesting. We used to have a regular customer who always managed to scare people. He quietly entered the store, suddenly appeared at the counter, greeted us cheerfully to announce his presence, "Hello! I'm a little weird, and I, I love reading books about the differences between different stones. "But the painfully naked truth is that, in fact, he has no interest in any distinction between different stones, but only because he is too lackluster to think that telling others that he has such interests and hobbies can broaden his personality." However, it did not. It goes without saying that anyone who calls themselves "a little eccentric" is obviously not very eccentric.
Type 2: homo odiosus (nasty person)
Stills from the movie "The Bookstore".
These people always feel like polymaths, and once you notice their habits, they find that they actively share their thoughts with you on any topic you choose to mention or mention by chance. You'd better be absolutely silent when they're present, because even the smallest of things can trigger their impassioned long-winded discourses about the topics you hate the most. However, it's often hard to find out that guests fall into this category until it's too late. They don't shy away from listening to other guests talking, and then interrupt (often aggressively) with their own opinions. On many occasions, I have had to apologize to innocent bystanders. They were just whispering, only to be yelled at by a stranger who happened to hear them and opened his mouth without permission (most likely a racist).
We have a distinguished representative of this type of person, and the next few passages recount my friend's experience of coming to the store one day to help out, and these experiences can fully illustrate the dangers of not knowing how to deal with such people.
One summer Saturday morning, when the weather was warm, my friend Robin showed up at eleven o'clock and stopped behind the counter in front of the bookstore. I was walking around the store, pretending to work. As usual, the daily routine of the bookstore was to come and go, and hours later, Alfred, a famous nasty ghost nearby, went to the counter with three books. With a calm, smug look, he placed the books heavily on the wooden countertop, his eyes fixed on Robin, as if declaring them "important in advance, because it is they who have made this situation."
After more than two decades of being tortured by Alfred, I know that the only safe response to all the guiding remarks he might throw is silence. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to teach Robin how to deal with this kind of situation. I couldn't do anything but signal him behind Alfred's back and tell him not to say anything. God forbid, Alfred asked if he could put the book on the counter first, and he was going to the bank's ATM to get some cash.
As soon as he was too far away to hear us, I immediately reminded Robin that Alfred was clearly waiting for one of us to ask him a question, so don't ask questions, lest you endure the endless and self-righteous speech. That's all he has to say. "When he comes back to pay, don't say anything that might be misunderstood by him, and make him think you're interested in things he's not upset about." That's what I told Robin before I separated, and then I went upstairs to make tea. Frankly, my words are not convincing, and I don't fantasize that these things I do can really have any effect.
Twenty minutes later, I was in the kitchen when robin, who was tired of the battle, appeared. He explained that Alfred had returned as soon as I left, but had not been able to get cash from the ATM, so avoid mentioning anything that might mislead Robin about his interest or his books, and Robin suggested that he use contactless card payments. As a result, this opened his box of words. For the next fifteen minutes, I had to listen to a long, paranoid and suspicious piece of talk about cybersecurity. I genuinely think he'll never be able to finish talking. ”
I have not yet found that Alfred does not have an unpleasant insight into which topic, nor does Alfred have any unjustified fear of which foreigner. Unsurprisingly, his solution to his unjustified xenophobia was to hope that the state would strike hard, often by deportation or imprisonment. The so-called crime is that they can't share his views.
Three types: homo utilis (useful people)
Not all experts are annoying, of course, unless you're Michael Gove. Sometimes, experts can come in handy. In January, I got a call from a lady who lives in Dumfries who had been cleaning up her collection of books and was in desperate need of selling some. It was a cold, gloomy afternoon, and when I arrived at her detached bungalow near the soccer field, I found boxes of books piled up everywhere. The collection was interesting and varied, including hundreds of cricket books collected by her husband, while she herself collected books such as Beatrice Potter, the Observer Book Series, and the Ladybird Book Series. These are all good stocks in bookstores for me. While going through the collection, I picked up a less appealing paperback, Patricia Winworth's The Road to Desolation, and it was at this point that she commented, "Oh, that's an interesting book, particularly rare and extremely valuable." "I looked at the book, and the cover was a photograph of a box of chocolates with a syringe on it. I would never say the book is rare or valuable, but she explains: "The people at Thornton, the people at the chocolate company, objected to the cover because they thought that associating their products with poison-filled syringes might damage their brand image." So the cover was withdrawn, turned into pulp, and then they designed another cover. "This kind of information is invaluable to a bookseller who (occasionally) needs to convince people that they're not talking nonsense."
I had, or until not long ago, had a regular visitor named Hamish. He died while I was still a few weeks away from writing the book. He was a film actor who was obsessed with military history. Chatting with him is a pleasure, and there is never a shortage of good stories in his stomach. He was interested in the subject of World War II, and knew no less about the field than any professional researcher, but he never got tired of it and never talked about it self-righteously.
In our short conversations, he would succinctly incorporate something extremely fascinating, polished, and always left me wanting to know more. I will miss him extraordinarily.
Four types: homo qui libros antiquos colligit
(Collector of Ancient Books)
Collectors of ancient books are a very different kind of people, and their interest in books often lies in the fact that they treat books as an object rather than the content they carry, although this is not entirely the case; many people who are interested in ancient books use them for academic or family history research. How to identify special editions from their own area of expertise, the collector of ancient books has always had an encyclopedic knowledge and a deep understanding of it. For example, early editions of Robert Pence's writings, especially the Collected Poems of the Scottish Dialect. Collectors of the book would rummag through the shelves of bookstores for the extremely difficult-to-find Kilmarnock edition, published in 1786 by John Wilson of Kilmarnock. They knew that of the six hundred and twelve book subscriptions, only eighty-four survived. And this version is easy to identify, as Pence dedicated the book to Gavin Hamilton. They were also fully aware of the twelve more poems in the second edition of the book (the 1787 Edinburgh edition dedicated to the "nobles and gentlemen of the Royal Hunting Department of Scotland" Pence was a tax collector who knew what to do to his advantage), and there was a typographical error in The Tribute to Haggis. The Scottish word "skinking" (meaning "watery") in this poem is incorrectly arranged as "stinking". This error continued in the London edition (also published in 1787), which became known as the "stinking edition". This mysterious knowledge may seem to have some obsessive-compulsive implications, but that's because people who are quite fanatical about a subject tend to have obsessive-compulsive traits.
Another peculiarity of the ancient book collection subgroup in the genus Expert is the inevitable whistling of dissatisfaction with prices. Yes, it might have been a limited-edition signature edition of the Ring of the Nibelungen in twelve volumes, illustrated by Arthur Larkham, priced at six hundred pounds. I can pack a ticket for you, and the customers who envy it will absolutely shake their heads in displeasure and tell you that they have seen this set of books elsewhere and that the asking price is much cheaper. But if that's the case, it's too strange that they're still staring at your book so greedily. Tell the bookseller you've seen cheaper versions, which is less likely to get a discount. We're all well aware that sometimes books cost more money, or the price of some books goes down, but the vast majority of people are less likely to lose a book because a stranger complains that they see other bookstores sell cheaper and cut the price of a book.
I have a regular shopper who buys ancient books, and although the bills often reach three figures when he comes to the counter, he can always make you feel as if you have been robbed the moment you leave the bookstore. He is retired, apparently from a wealthy family, and has an inclusive interest in rare books. The last time he came to the store that morning, I had just bought a pile of books from an extremely interesting old man. The old man's family has obviously stepped on both feet on a higher social class. These books once lay comfortably on a magnificent shelf with the library stamp you always looked forward to seeing when collecting ancient books; heraldry has a long history, and the wood smell of the use of fire is still between the papers. However, it is obvious that the family later fell into the middle of the road and the house was gone. I suspect it was the last scrap in the library, which was brought in a bread crate in a supermarket. I can't remember exactly how much he paid, but I left his contact details because there were still books I didn't have time to check and evaluate, and I wanted to compensate him if the final price was too low. I reckon there should be a two-volume maloney's Death of King Arthur, illustrated and inscribed by Aubrey Biazley. The collector of the ancient books came to the shop, carefully inspected the goods I had just received, and finally accidentally found The set of books of Biazley. He asked me how much I was asking for, and before I had even had a chance to do a detailed study, I told him eight hundred pounds, and he paid (unexpectedly) happily. A few months later, I met him by chance at the Carlisle Book Festival, and he triumphantly told me that at the London auction he had sold the set for a whopping nineteen thousand pounds.
As a bookseller, I feel it is my duty to treat the people who sell books to me fairly. I felt cheated, not for myself, but for the old gentleman who sold me the book. If it were me who would also sell these books, and also sell nineteen thousand pounds, I would have written him a check and given him most of the income in order to reassure myself. Yes, we all love bargains, but in these kinds of things, money isn't all. No one wants to feel like they've been fooled. The collector of ancient books knew very well that I had not had a chance to discover the higher value of this set of books. If he was willing to share the nineteen thousand pounds with the man who sold me the book, but kicked me out, I would have died of joy.
Despite this encounter, I am saddened by the fact that an ancient book collector seems to be an endangered species. The term "endangered species" can be used to describe the vast majority of bibliophiles. The number of them appearing before me is as small as a year. Knowledge is no longer merely the content of books, and strictly speaking, books may no longer be as precious as they once were as the source of knowledge. My parents' friend Brian collected Jeffrey Fannor's books, and because the author was so outdated, I stopped buying his books a few years ago. I've told Brian about it on many occasions, but he doesn't pay any attention to it. As long as others are in Scotland, they will come to the store and ask if I have any new books from Fanoir. He had a list, written in a tattered notebook, and he always broke through with an optimistic passion that I could never have. I've never had anything he's looking for here, mainly because I've sent all of Fanoel's books to scrap for recycling. I felt some heartache at the thought that this would lead to one day in the future when Brian would eventually stop coming to the store. I doubt that until the last time I close the bookstore door, I will be asked about Jeffrey Fanor's work, unless he can enjoy the unexpected popularity, like Winston Graham's Poldark series of novels. After the BBC filmed the series, actor Aidan Turner took off his shirt several times in each episode, which made the series famous.
Five types: mechanicus in domo sua
(Home Mechanic)
These customers are an absolute source of happiness. Usually, they look for the Haynes Handbook for Land Rover. If you don't have one, they'll never be disappointed; but if you happen to have one, they'll be overjoyed. They don't read anything except cars-related books. But who cares? They read what they want to read, and like everyone, there is not the slightest literary pretense. I like and respect them. They are passionate, delightful and deserve the highest praise. They would devour their literary prey with relish, more zealous than the professor at Oxford who studied Chaucer's early manuscripts to find an early Caxton edition of an ancient book. This happiness is what they deserve. They crave information, whether it's the spark plug diameter of a Suffolk low-legged lawn mower in 1947 or the size of a Ford Cotina gearbox in 1976. Movable type printing should have been invented for such people to be for those who really do practical things for these people who use written words, not for those who pretend to be like them. Those people seemed to exist either to promote their particular religious prejudices, or to confirm their belief in pseudo-wisdom such as water divination or dream parsing, or to make them self-hypnotize themselves at the intersection of six veins in Slough's hut, and therefore should have the status of a national attraction. But in fact, its real belonging should be under the wheels of a group of bulldozers.
Home mechanics always walked nervously into bookstores, often wearing greasy cargo pants. When you tell them that you do have the old Haynes Handbook, they rejoice. Even if you don't have what they're looking for, they'll always be able to find one of them themselves, and it happens to be related to the car that one of his friends is repairing. When I lived in Bristol, a friend had been buying an old car for repairs. He mentioned the Haynes Handbook as "Haynes's Book of Lies" because there were always lines, or brake fluid reservoirs, that didn't match the real condition of the car he was repairing at the time.
*
In the case of Peritus or Specialists, in general, Type One and Type Two are the kind of people you absolutely want to kick out of a bookstore. Usually, type one knows to brag about itself there. The husbands or wives of these people will end up being so tired of their years of companionship that they can ignore them completely. Bookstores, on the other hand, provide the perfect place for these people to talk about it. For Type TWO, politics is a rather ardent subject. They usually don't care that the "victims" may disagree with their views, no matter how extreme. Climate change (which they usually deny), same-sex marriage (which they often oppose), and the European Union (which we won't discuss) are all their usual topics. The more indifferent others are to their opinions, the more they feel the need to shout out louder. Type three and type five have become increasingly scarce types, and you'll want to have dinner with them. Type Four, on the other hand, becomes the guy who owes you several dinners and a bottle of expensive wine, but you don't want to see either food or wine.
The content of this article is an excerpt from the book "Seven Kinds of People in the Bookstore" with the permission of the publishing house, and the content has been abridged, and the title is taken by the editor.
Original author | [English] Sean Bethel;
Excerpt from | Qingzi;
Editor| Zhang Ting;
Introduction Proofreading | Liu Baoqing