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| Jen Campbell in Watermark Books |
I
met Jen Campbell at a book-signing in Watermark Books in Kings
Cross Station. I’m always excited to meet fellow shop people and
exchange retail stories. I was also eager to meet her because like
mine, her book started out as a blog, and blog-to-book stories happen
to be one of my favourites!
I
knew it was going to be good but I didn’t expect to be on the Tube
in the middle of rush hour, crushed between arms and legs, reading it
with a big grin on my face. It’s hilarious. HILARIOUS. It
reminded me so much of working in my own shop; all the random
requests and bizarre assumptions. I loved it and would recommend it
as a great Christmas present for anyone who can read!
Customer: What’s your name?
Bookseller: Jen.
Customer: Hmmm. I don’t like that name. Is it ok if I call you something else?
Customer: Do you have this children’s book I’ve heard
about? It’s supposed to be very good. It’s called “Lionel
Richie and the Wardrobe.”
When
did you start writing your blog and how did it become a book?
After
a particularly strange day in May 2011, I started putting few
examples of ‘weird things...’ up on my blog. They were never
supposed to become a book, so what happened next was a wonderful
surprise. The posts were very popular - the links were thrown around
twitter by bookshops and publishers who found them funny. Neil Gaiman
tweeted about them, and then blogged about them, which opened them up
to a much wider audience, one of whom was Hugh, who works at
Constable and Robinson. Hugh called me at the bookshop asking if I’d
like to make a book of ‘Weird Things...’. Half an hour later he
was standing in front of me in the bookshop. It was all very surreal.
I’d just got an agent for my fiction, so Hugh and my agent had a
chat, contracts were drawn up and I got on with writing it. It all
happened rather quickly!
People
have this silly idea that working in a bookshop is relaxing! Did you
ever have time to blog/write in the shop?
Oh,
if I had a pound for every time someone said to me ‘I’d love to
work in a bookshop; you get to read all day!’ Very much not the
case. There’s only ever one person in our bookshop (most of the
time that person is me). I have to open up, deal with the buying and
selling of books (I work in an antiquarian bookshop), assist
customers who are in the shop/customers on the phone (sometimes both
at once!); then there’s cataloguing the stock, researching for
buyers, repairing books, doing the stocktake, internet orders,
answering emails... the list goes on and on. There’s always a lot
to do.
What’s the weirdest non-book request you’ve
ever been asked?
Oh,
if we sell iPod chargers, lottery tickets, Christmas trees...
I
thought people only haggled at markets and chandelier shops, but no
so! What was your cheekiest haggler? How do you deal with them?
The
cheekiest - not even a haggle - was someone who wanted to take the
dust jacket from a first edition we had, as they didn’t have a dust
jacket on their own copy. He didn’t want to pay for it; he just
wanted it, and wasn’t very pleased when I declined!
I
read you have a section in your bookshop for toddlers. How do you
avoid colossal damage being done to the shop and all your books?
I keep
a beady eye on them. Obviously we want children to look at the books,
but they can get a bit over-excited. Usually the parents are
vigilant, but not always. The latter was more the case in Edinburgh
(where I worked before moving to London, in a new independent
bookshop). There was a boy who ripped the head off ‘the tiger who
came to tea’ and whose parent really didn’t care, children who
would climb bookshelves, and there were even parents who would leave
their toddlers in the shop and disappear to Tesco next door to do
their food shopping. It can be a bit stressful, but it keeps us on
our toes!
What
book have you found yourself mostly recommending this month?
The
difficulty with an antiquarian bookshop is I can’t recommend the
same book again and again as we only have one copy of a particular
edition. But, for Christmas, lovely old editions of Alice,
Orlando the Marmalade Cat, some signed Doctor Who books, and
beautiful editions of fairy tales illustrated by Dulac, Arthur
Rackham etc.
In
life, outside of our older books, the books I’ve been recommending
have been The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson-Walker, Sweet Home -
Carys Bray, New World Fairy Tales - Cassandra Parkin and Swimming
Home - Deborah Levy. Poetry-wise, I’ve been recommending One Eye’d
Leigh - Katharine Kilalea, A Body Made of You - Melissa Lee-Houghton
and Tomorrow We Will Live Here - Ryan Van Winkle.
If
you weren’t a bookseller, what would you be doing?
Erm...
this question makes me panicky! Ha. Well, I’d be a writer (which is
my other job, anyway), though that wouldn’t pay all the bills. Hmm.
Perhaps I’d be an English Literature lecturer... I don’t know. I
can’t really imagine not being a bookseller.
My
local stationers says Kindles will never replace books, and that he's
selling more paper than ever. Other people believe digital books will
replace books in the next ten - twenty years. What's your opinion on
the matter? Do you fear for your bookshop?
I
fear for our bookshop but not really because of Kindle - because of
the massive rise in the number of charity shops and because of huge
discounts on books in supermarkets and on Amazon.
Re.
e-readers: at the moment I think that there’s a definite split in
the market. A lot of e-readers are bought as presents and are never
used; a lot of people have been converted; some people say that they
have an e-reader but still buy the paperback versions of the books
they love. It’s so hard to predict. I don’t own an e-reader
myself, and I hate that Amazon have the monopoly on the market. I
completely understand the practicality of an e-reader; it’s just
not for me (but I’m a bookseller; I would say that!). I love the
smell of a book, the feel of it, and the actual event of going to a
bookshop to look for a book to read; it’s about the whole
experience as far as I’m concerned. Also, I read a lot of poetry
and I think that loses something in translation from paperback to
e-book.
What
I think will happen is that e-books will continue to grow in
popularity and, perhaps, the market may eventually end up being
e-books and hardbacks. Physical books are going to become more and
more about how they look; they will be gifts, beautiful objects to
treasure. I love my paperbacks and I want them to stay, though, so
I’ll have my fingers crossed for that. What I don’t want is the
price of e-books to fall to an unsustainable level - which in some
cases they are doing, and I hope the pirating of e-books is
controlled as well as it can be. Ultimately I still want books to be
valued, and seen as things that are worth paying money for. So many
people work their socks off for a book to be produced, and it’s
hard enough for writers to make a living as it is.
I’ve
heard another book is on the horizon. Tell us more!
Indeed!
I’ve just finished writing it. 'More Weird Things Customers Say in
Bookshops' will be published April 2013. We’re just finalising the
cover at the moment, and then the lovely Brothers McLeod will
illustrate it, as they did for the first volume.
In
other writing, my poetry pamphlet ‘The Hungry Ghost Festival’ is
published by The Rialto (that came out in July), and I’ve just
finished writing my first full-length poetry collection called ‘the
day we ran away from the circus,’ which we’ll be submitting to
publishers in the new year. I’m also working on a novel. So, lots
of different things. I’m looking forward to having a little bit of
a break over Christmas, - reading lots of books, eating lots of
cheese and having a glass or two of mulled wine. Oh yes. I hope you
all have a lovely Christmas, too!
*
Customer: Do you have a book that has a list of aphrodisiacs? I’ve got a date on Friday.
*
