For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money–stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted.
Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. When I worked in a second-hand bookshop–so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios–the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.
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