Promotional Information

Love, Nina meets Black Books: a wry and hilarious account of life in Scotland's biggest second-hand bookshop and the band of eccentrics and book-obsessives who work there

About the Author

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, and also one of the organisers of the Wigtown Festival.

Reviews

Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny, this gently meandering tale of British eccentricity will stay long in the memory.
*Daily Mail*

Funny and fascinating in equal measure - a must for all those of us who haunt the sepulchres where old books are laid to rest.
*Anthony McGowan*

The Diary Of A Bookseller is warm (unlike Bythell's freezing-cold shop) and funny, and deserves to become one of those bestsellers that irritate him so much.
*Mail on Sunday*

Peopled with fascinating characters ... a sarcastic reminder of the struggles of small business ownership, the importance of community and the frustration of dealing with customers ... occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
*Herald*

Wonderfully entertaining ... Bythell is a true believer, who makes a passionate case for the importance of books
*Observer*

Tempted to follow your dream and open a second-hand bookshop? Don't do anything before you read Shaun Bythell ... second-hand bookshops are alive because of people like him.
*The National*

Utterly compelling and Bythell has a Bennett-like eye for the amusing eccentricities of ordinary people ... I urge you to buy this book and please, even at the risk of being insulted or moaned at, buy it from a real live bookseller.
*Sunday Express*

I tore through the pages, but I was also rather sad when it finished - I could have read much, much more. Any bibliophiles should race to get a copy.
*Shiny New Books*

A book and bookshop lover's delight.
*Red*

Laconic, droll, opinionated and unconvincingly misanthropic ... Wigtown's Pepys.
*Times Literary Supplement*

So sardonically funny it could be designed to de-romance the book trade
*The Times*

I was delightedly reading - and I thoroughly recommend to you - a book I was given: The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, the owner of a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown. On the cover, the blurb says it is "funny and fascinating in equal measure" and I quote that because I couldn't put it better myself.
*Eddie Mair*

Gentle, ... funny and immensely soothing
*Alan Bennett*

A brilliant, funny and recommended book
*Mike Scott, The Waterboys*

Charming and witty and wicked
*Jen Campbell*

I generally dislike books about bookselling because they're treacly and self-satisfied, but Shaun Bythell's subversive The Diary of a Bookseller is an antidote.
*New York Times (a New York Times Book of the Year)*