Day 4

Managed 600 words in my lunch hour which helped me on the way when I got home. I might be wrong, and feel free to leave a comment if you want but it seems to be going quite well so far. I thought I'd painted myself into a lot corner yesterday but so far it is going to what little plan I have. So here's day four's output:

Although I had been working for Grant longer than any other of his employees, he still won’t trust me to accept stock from customers. Or, at least, he will allow me to accept stock but then I have to go through the whole rigmarole of looking up the rough second hand price of every book being offered before I give a price. And this isn’t some industry manual of second hand book prices, if one exists, which I doubt. Flogging second hand books isn’t an exact science, but if it was, no doubt Grant would say he was a professor and stick some made up letters after his name. In fact, come to think of it, he has got a manual that he wrote about five years ago, that goes into far-end-of-a-fart details about the minutiae of the second hand book industry. I’m not joking, it even has scenarios where he describes how to deal with just about every situation you might encounter in the high octane world of knocking out used books. I read the first chapter once when I was incredibly bored and I lost any respect I had for the man then, not that I had more than a gnat’s fart’s worth before then. It even included a mission statement at the start which made even the one in Jerry Maguire seem sincere. I don’t know what he makes in a year from the shop but it surely isn’t enough to support two staff members and his lifestyle, such as it is. Sean and I have speculated on what else he does to supplement his income from the shop and have come up with a wide range of activities, including dealing drugs (possible – I did come across some hollowed out books in the back room once which could have held at least a kilo of Class A, when I mentioned it to Grant he nearly shit a brick and let me leave early). My best guess was porn though, he’s always resisted the temptation to open an ‘adult section’ like most of the other second-hand shops around. He reckons he’s above all that and he doesn’t need to ‘peddle smut to sad wankers’. I say he would be ideal material in that case as he would know his target audience intimately. To be honest though, I’m pretty glad, not because I’m arsed about having the dirty mac brigade mixing with our regular customers, but the thought of handling second hand porn mags makes me feel dirty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-porn but if there’s one item that should only have one owner it’s a jazz mag. No doubt if we did have a change of policy though, Grant would have a supplementary chapter in the manual on the correct pricing structure for one-handed art pamphlets by the end of the week. The types of people we get selling stuff to us varies from students selling off their old text books for beer tokens, to dodgy looking bastards shiftily handing over a few moody hardbacks and taking the first price we give. Our largest amount of stock comes from usually single blokes handing over boxes of the stuff. You can see them coming a mile off. Typically they park right outside the shop, heft one box out of the boot and stagger up to the counter with it, before running out and bringing a few more equally laden boxes in and looking expectantly at me or Sean. These are the worst type of customers, because they invariably stand there watching as you inspect every book individually. Even though the reason they’re selling the books is usually because they’re newly divorced and trying to get rid of any assets before the solicitor moves in they still argue the toss over the price, no matter how generous we’ve been. The rough estimate Grant employs is buy for somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the cover price, depending on condition and offer a quarter the price of exchange in cash. “It’s industry standard,” he says. Like there’s a whole industry for this rather flimsy excuse for a business, it makes me think of governing bodies and annual conferences called Bookexcon or some such. The nearest thing approaching such an event is the annual book festival at Hay-On-Wye, which of course, Grant refuses to attend, “because it’s full of ponces and wankers.” The irony is lost on him of course. On the day that changed my life forever, Grant was out of town, attending to ‘a bit of business’. Neither Sean or myself could summon even a grain of interest to ask what the nature of this business was, despite the fact that Grant hung around the desk, obviously itching to tell us. In the end, he gathered up a sheath of unsold copies of Eddie Campbell’s ‘Bacchus’ series and swept out in a cloud of his own intrigue to his waiting knackered old Punto. “Wankstick!” I observed, Sean snickered and went over to fill the space Grant had created in the graphic novel section. Sean was a bit anal about alphabetisation in his domain and I could see the havoc that Grant had wreaked had caused him a great deal of personal angst. I went back to thinking of one hundred and one uses for the last Booker Prize winner’s pile of unsold hardbacks. Then the door clanked open and a bloke huffed in with an overflowing box. Probably contained some books I idly surmised. I have a gift for that kind of thing.
“Do you buy books?” he said, dumping the box next to the large sign affixed to the counter saying ‘we buy books, all conditions. Valid ID required.’
“We have been known to, but only to fund our underground crime fighting syndicate.” I said. He looked at me like I was soft in the head. I could see I was going to be on a mark down with this one.
“I’ve got these books to sell,” he said, helpfully indicating the box currently spilling its contents in front of me.
“I see,” I said, “and have they been in the family long?”
“Sorry?” Christ almighty.
“How many have you got here roughly?” I really couldn’t be arsed to do a full inventory of this lot, just the top layer looked like the sort of rubbish we already had proliferating the shelves. I’d already clocked one ‘Bible Code’, three Phillip Pullmans and a brace of Titchmarsh. The signs weren’t good.
“Er, I don’t know, they’re not mine you see. About fifty?” The bloke seemed distracted. “Do you mind me asking where they came from?” I said, mentally jotting down a description of the man.
“My, er, wife.”
“Does she know that you’re selling them? Sorry to be awkward but you know.” I nodded at the ID sign.
“No. She’s dead.” Oh fuck-poles. How shit did I feel?
“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” We get a few blokes like this through every now and again but this one did seem genuine. I actually caught myself trying to remember what advice Grant had given me to help decide if the vendor was genuine when they played the grief card. Oh, bollocks, I thought, I’d better be straight, he might start blubbing. I went through the box, totting up a total as I went. In the end I told him fifteen pounds cash or forty two exchange and surprisingly he took the exchange. That made me feel worse, ninety five percent of sellers take cash, but him taking exchange made his story check out more in my mind. I then committed the cardinal sin (in Grant’s big book of toss) of issuing a credit note and saying he could come back and use it anytime. “Always make sure they use the exchange there and then George. We can’t be pissin’ about with credit notes, we’ll end up with a load of stock and nowhere to put it. Alright squire?” Told you he was annoying didn’t I? Using sobriquets like squire and chief was just one of the many infuriating traits he has.
Hang on a minute. You might notice that I’m ducking in and out of tenses like I don’t know when things happened. There is a reason for this, but I’m conscious that I promised you no more mystery, so sorry about that, you’ll just have to bear with me.
Anyway, the bloke looked at the credit note like it was all he had left of his dead wife, then picked up a copy of a book called ‘How much joy can you stand?’ that we keep on the counter as an impulse buy for insecure women and thrust it towards me. Personally, looking at the bloke, I thought I could answer the question for him, save him reading the thing. “I’ll take this now, how much is that off the forty two pounds?”
“Er, don’t worry mate, it’s on the house.” I said, pushing it back to him. Sean looked up from his sorting with a ‘does not compute’ look on his face. “Sorry about the, you know, misunderstanding.”
“Oh, OK, thanks. You’ve been very obliging.” The poor guy was obviously not used to anyone showing him any sort of consideration. I felt even shitter, if that was possible, even Grant might have felt a twitch of compassion, before he shafted him on the price. He made for the door, but then turned and came back to the desk. He reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a slim paperback book and held it out to me. The cover was plain blue with just two words on it. “It’s yours. Take it and read it tonight.” He glanced over at Sean, who pretended to be fascinated by ‘Silver Surfer meets Spiderman. The bloke lowered his voice conspiratorily, “I hope it helps you like it helped me.” Then he turned and scampered out of the shop. That last line really troubled me somehow, he didn’t seem like he’d a whole heap of good fortune lately and I suddenly ran through a list of conspiracies, top of which was that he’d murdered his wife. I looked down at the book in my hand. The title was ‘Be lucky!’

Daily Word Count: 1,711
Total Word Count: 7,020
% above target: 5.28
Words to go: 42,980
Word of the Day: proliferate