Shaun Bythell: Seven Kinds of People you find in Bookshops

Shaun Bythell is a second-hand bookseller in Wigtown, and is the author of two books about book-selling. His third will be published in November. It is guaranteed to offend almost everyone who has ever crossed the threshold of a book shop.

Shaun will be interviewed by Michael Gallico, Chairman of the Festival Steering Group and of Casemate Publishers Ltd.

This session is presented in celebration of the life of Simon Heald, owner of Slightly Foxed Books and Patron of this Festival.

Shaun’s The Diary of a Bookseller is soon to be a major TV series. If you enter his shop, here’s a word of advice – don’t mention Amazon! This is a man who shot a Kindle and wall-mounted it! 

Reviews of Shaun’s books about owning a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s Book Town:

‘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’. Jon Dennis Mail on Sunday

‘Wonderfully entertaining’. Observer

‘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’. Charlotte Heathcote Sunday Express

‘Laconic, droll, opinionated and unconvincingly misanthropic … Wigtown’s Pepys’. Alan Taylor Times Literary Supplement

Shaun’s website: www.the-bookshop.com