Book extract: The Diary of a Bookseller

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop in Wigtown - Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop, with over 100,000 books spread over a mile of shelving. In 2014 he began to keep a diary of the goings-on there and The Diary of a Bookseller, published this week by Profile, is the result. His diary entries, which cover a 12-month period from 5 February 2014, are peopled with fascinating characters, from Nicky, his unruly, Morrisons-skip-raiding, sort-of-deputy, to Mr Deacon, possibly the only customer who still orders books from a shop rather than Amazon, to his friend “Eliot”, organiser of the annual Wigtown Book Festival and the star of the following extract, who delights in leaving his shoes around for people to trip over.