Life in the day of a bookseller

What do I do all day?

As I mentioned before, I thought I planned to spend my days at Books Books Books sipping cappuccinos and making literary small-talk with less fortunate readers. Surprisingly, this doesn't happen very often. Yesterday was a pretty exceptional day but I covered all the elements that make this job, if not exactly fun, then at least interesting. Here's what I did.

I got up at 6am and took some money to the bank. I needed the cash to pay some bills. On Monday the money-in machine had swallowed the day's takings so I was relieved when the payment went without a problem.

Back at the shop I paid all the bills marked urgent (i.e. most of them), then I walked down to the car hire place and picked up a van I needed.

I drove it back to the shop and then began to answer the emails which started 'Dear Matthew, This is the third time I have written to you and I hoping - praying - that I might get an answer.' At 8.50 I began to reply to an emailed order, indeed I had got as far as the 'D' in 'Dear' when the phone rang. It was a teacher making an order. As I took this down my colleague James arrived.

We loaded the van with about 30-odd boxes and I drove it to a local suppliers. I had ordered about 400 books through this supplier at the beginning of August. The week before I had exhausted the box marked, 'Ask politely about the status of your books' and had started hectoring them twice a day for news. This had got better results and I drove to their place to pick up my books.

With these loaded I drove to a school where I had arranged to sell directly to the students. The concierge who had been slated to help me disappeared leaving me to carry all the boxes from the van to the school, down some stairs and then to another wing. By the time I'd finished there were about 100 students waiting for books. Some of the teachers kindly helped me and by 3pm I was out the door and back in BBB.

I figured I would unload the two boxes I had in the van and then drop it off. However, a teacher drove up and we discussed her order on the street. James and another colleague had a few questions and another customer needed some advice. Then our favourite delivery driver arrived. We call him Mr Benzedrine because he drives to and from Argaau everyday and by Friday his eyes look like bloody dots in the snow. He doesn't speak French and I don't speak German so we've evolved a kind of pidjin that covers how many deliveries he has to do, if James's sleeping and if he can leave his van in my spot for five minutes. I took the van back when he left.

It was 4pm and a local teacher came in to speak with me. There had been a problem with her order a few days earlier. James had mistaken the figures '17' for '117' and '20' for '120' so we had a few too many. I had written to her to say, 'I have just shot James and stuffed his body in the nearest rubbish bin' to which she had replied, 'I'm soooo sorry to have caused the death of your colleague' and  I supposed her visit was to reassure herself that we had recycled his body correctly. I'll never know because someone uttered the words, 'It's been really quiet today' and suddenly we had about 50 customers in the shop. The next time I looked up she was gone.

Having been going for 11 hours on a bottle of orange juice I popped home and bewed a cup of English lifesaver. I wanted to stay home, but there were emails I knew I had to answer so I went back to work. It was ten to six when I continued the email I had started that morning, 'Dear Mr Moser' I wrote, 'Thank you for your email which I received this morning....'

I got home at a very reasonable hour and after supper I picked up a book The Moment by Douglas Kennedy which I am reading because I am interviewing him at the Morges literary festival next Sunday. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work might have been more appropriate.