Diaries is a type of writing that flourished in the West with the diversity of his ideas. His book took it out of stereotypes and what was known about its connection with intimacy to public affairs, and he began writing to be published and not included in the drawers, under pillows and hideouts, as was the "intimate diary", so the writer of the "private diary" became directed to the public to present his experience Hence the endless and endless forms of experimentation in this kind of performance that goes beyond writing to other arts such as painting and cinema.
Therefore, everyone is qualified to write his experience in a magical diary if he knows how to write that experience. All our days are exciting and deserve to be read if we know to capture their moments that make them a special experience.
Professions represented one of these entries for writing experiences, and perhaps the most famous diary concerned with professions is the "Antiques Seller Diaries", in which saleswoman Yvonne de Promend narrates a river diary that exceeds 10 parts of her memories with her customers, their daily jokes, the jokes and treasures of the profession.
Library notes
Close to these diaries, the famous British novelist George Orwell wrote a "Library Memoirs", in which he narrated the secrets of selling ancient books as he worked as a bookseller.
Who are the customers who visit the library?
How were their moods?
What kinds of books are required?
And for whom were they asking for it?
This library was also lending books, which revealed to Orwell the tastes and standards of the readers.
Close to this book appears in Arabic the translation of the book "Diaries of the Bookseller" by Sean Bethle and the Arabization of Abbas Al-Mafraji in Dar Al-Mada. It is a diary in which Bethle traces the book of George Orwell and writes his diaries day by day in the library he bought.
In the beginning of his diary, the writer narrates how he came to the world of bookselling and narrates his story with the "The Bookshop" in Westtown, Britain, the library he owns and manages, as it was originally for others, and the day he saw it for the first time and was accompanied by a friend of his, he expected her to Shuts down in one year.
That was when he was 18 years old and he was preparing to enter the university, and after 12 years Sean Bethle returned to Whigtown to visit his parents at Christmas, he enters the library and asks for a book, and during the conversation with the library owner about looking for a job the owner suggested that he buy him the library Because he will retire, the writer replied at that time that he had no money to buy the shop, so the owner’s answer was, “I don’t need money, for anything you think made the banks,” and so in less than a year the library became the king of Sean Bethle to begin his journey with this strange and arduous profession, selling books.
From the outset, the writer alludes to the difficulty and cruelty of the experiment by referring to an article from George Orwell's articles on books and their sale. He says, "Perhaps it would have been better for me before that to read George Orwell's article, what he wrote in his" Library Notes "in 1936 proves to be a reality today, and it seems a useful harbinger. For every naive person like me that the world of selling used books is not, as one imagines, just sitting in a cozy chair near the fireplace with two feet in feet, smoking a pipe and reading to Ghibon (an American writer), while customers who are kind to you are busy with a smart talk, before they pay a handful of cash, in Reality, the truth could be more different. "
Thus begins a 400-page diary with this disappointment and thwarting the horizon of waiting for the reader. The world of old bookselling is a world different from the romantic image we have in mind.
Diary in a special form
Every journalist in the world adopts its own format within the pattern of the diary itself, so what makes it a journal is basically its commitment to history, that is, exporting today's date at the top of the page and then writing or fixing anything in it, such as: events, reflections, foreign bodies through the "collage" (art Cut and paste scraps), write an article, an idea, a word, a blank, but what makes this diary special is what the blogger makes of signs that refer to his diary alone.
Sean made all his diaries with a phrase by George Orwell from his book "Library Memoirs", the number of books ordered on the Internet, the number of books in existence, and finishes them with the number of customers and total revenues, and between these constants Sean tells us his day's jokes with customers and their strange stories. Diaries are basically like an inventory. By the merchant, which was interspersed with observations, reflections, emotions and thoughts.
The clientele is cranky
From the very first moment, George Orwell sits in his darkness on the diary, where the writer opens his book through excerpts from his book "Memoirs of a Library", and the first opening section warns against his profession, where the writer puts this short dialogue "Would you like your profession to be a bookseller? My employer was kind to me and some happy days I spent in the shop, no. "
This short export operates in writing as if it were a manifesto that the author will then clarify along hundreds of pages. The writer starts again from Orwell's biography and his relationship to books, writing, "Orwell's reluctance to commit the act of selling books is understandable."
"There is a primitive style for bookstore owners who are not social, not tolerant, impatient." Thus, the writer puts us in a strange and paradoxical atmosphere, a public shop that sells goods that are books, and the seller is anti-social and intolerant.
And he adds on another site that he is complaining about Orwell's reference to this profession as a criminal act that a person carries out against himself when he uses the phrase "commits", and Sean Bethle begins to distort that romantic image of the bookstore and bookseller and mobilize strange characters in the shop, starting with the currency.
The writer talks about those claiming to love books who represent a constant inconvenience to a store, which is the library, for the library is the only place that you can enter and flip around as you wish and go out without buying anything and not paying a penny. People who love books are really rare, despite the presence of large numbers of people who claim that. Such people are easy to recognize. They often present themselves as "book people". They may wear T-shirts or carry a bag with slogans that confirm exactly their love for books, but the most sure way to get to know them They never buy books. "
People visit the library from whom you expect any behavior. They usually spoil Sean's mood, such as what happened on Monday 3 March, when customers spoiled the day’s beauty with their behavior. He turned over a pile of books and left them strewn on the floor. Shortly thereafter, a whistled customer with a ponytail and wearing a hat that I can assume had borrowed from a clown came in. He bought a copy of Paulo Coelho's book The Alchemist.
The writer tells the stories of many customers who buy books through the Internet, their problems, correspondence, threats, and sometimes blackmail to discredit the library, because requests are delayed or to avoid paying the price or recovering it, such as if one of the customers sends the following message: "I have not received my book yet, please solve the problem for me. Now I did not write an evaluation about your service, "another customer writes," This is outrageous, I do not know how you had the audacity to call yourself a bookseller while sending such waste. "
Career ideas and secrets
The diaries reveal the secrets of the trade in used books, as the owner of the library opens up to fuel the activity of the library or resist the recession of the book trade, the space for cultural meetings that seem far from the world of the book, such as hosting the most famous tattoo-bearing man who presents a show and his story with tattoos to the public, or hosting young artists to present in the library .
The daily, Monday, February 10, reveals the idea of launching clubs in the library to fuel revenues. The writer tells us about the "Random Book Club", which is a monthly club that has been joined by more than 150 participants presented by the writer, saying, "The Random Book Club is a branch of the library that I established a few years ago. When business worsened and the future seemed vague, for £ 95 a year, the subscribers receive a book every month, and they are not entitled to express an opinion on the type of book they receive. The choice is entirely my responsibility, and it reveals to us that this is an investment in addicts to reading, which is what saved it. Of financial confusion during a difficult period in the book trade. "
As we pointed out at the outset to the similarity of the diaries of the antica seller and the sellers of used books, the author makes the same analogy between the two businesses in the interest of the two professions, he says, “When I go to a place to buy books, the sense of expectation creates a kind of excitement that dominates me as if you are throwing a net in The sea never knows what you will find in it, I think book merchants and antica dealers share that same sense of excitement. "
The author admits to a group of secrets, perhaps the funniest of which is what he narrated about the library’s Facebook page, as after following many similar pages he decided to focus “on customer behavior, especially stupid questions and ignorant customers, it appears that this has worked. The more I attack the customers, the more followers I have. Liked page. "
Tragedies of the profession
The book tells poignant stories related to the book trade profession, especially with regard to the sale of his library by the deceased's family, which are tempting offers to the merchant who goes to value the books on display, but those visits leave a great psychological impact on him when a sensitive merchant picks up secret matters related to the book owners throwing in his heart an ambiguous feeling of guilt as The last person tasked with wiping them out.
He says, "The experience of unloading a dead property is an experience familiar to most people in the used book trade, and it is an experience that makes you slowly become fossilized, except when it comes to a dead couple without children, for one reason or another. Pictures on the wall, the husband in his uniform, the wife - who is young In Paris - it raises a kind of depression that would not have existed if they had children living after their death. Removing such a group of books seems to be the final act of their character’s righteousness. You are responsible for erasing the evidence that they existed.
The book "The Bookseller's Diary" is worth reading, especially for those interested in opening libraries to sell books or to study the personality of the reader. It is a book that provides many ideas about the world of writers and reading in a simple and ironic narrative style, and gives hidden advice from an expert in promoting books.
And Sean Bethle is still devising new methods to get the book out of its isolation, the latest of which is the promotional video that he and his workers put for the library, and I think that this work in which the owner wrote his diaries and his daily routine not only made him famous, but turned his shop into a tourist attraction, no one today thinks about Visit Wigtown, and does not include the library and its owner on his tourism program.