This book is hysterical, easy to read and troublesome to put down. I found it in an op shop and it happily joined my To Be Read Pile until a few days ago.

Clive Linklater is a bookseller in St Leonard’s-on-Sea, England. This book is a year in his life as he experiments with buying books. He already buys and sells books but this is different, he’s going to sell a book for £5, buy another book for the same price, sell that for £10, buy another book for that price which he plans to sell for £20 and so on throughout the year. He figures if he doubles the value of the book each month in a year he’ll have £10,240 and at the beginning of the year he’s already wondering where you can buy a book for that price. It seems Linklater generally sells low priced books so he gets out of his depth fairly quickly.  And there’s proof! I googled Linklater and found another bookseller had already visited his shop and written about it on her blog.

So many stories I loved in this book. Linklater is not a fast driver and he tells us quite casually as he gets up at 5am in order to drive the few miles to the location of his next book purchase, his speed actually does get into double figures but not by terribly much and as he inches his way along the traffic piles up behind him. The radio talks about a slow moving vehicle in his area and he considers taking a detour to avoid it until he realises it’s him.

We read about Sam’s Emporium and the owner’s attempt to keep customers out of his shop. The many signs, the many barricades and his general demeanor. I couldn’t help wondering if this was all real and if so, how Sam made money.

We’re told about the cycle of books in bookshops and how the books travel from one bookshop to another as they are bought and sold by the owners of each shop. He does ponder this and for his ponderings you’ll need to read the book.

I did enjoy it. The chapters are short so easy enough to finish a chapter and attempt to put it down. Well written and hysterically funny, I did laugh on a number of occasions. One day I hope to actually get to England again and I’ll make an effort to get to his shop and meet him, it’d be nice to find out if he’s really as laidback as he seems from his writings.