Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

By: Shaun Bythell

Narrated by: Peter Kenny

Length: 2 hrs

Publisher's summary

A wickedly witty field guide to bookstore customers by the curmudgeonly shop owner and author of Confessions of a Bookseller. Shaun Bythell knows them all - from the “Person Who Doesn’t Know What They Want (But Thinks It Might Have a Blue Cover)” to the “Parents Secretly After Free Childcare”. The business of books has never been funnier.

In a tradition that runs from R. M. Williamson’s Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904 to Jen Campbell’s Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012 (with George Orwell’s 1936 Bookshop Memories in between), here is the latest and perhaps most complete attempt to classify people who shop in bookstores. It does take all kinds.

Employing something like Linnaean taxonomic groups, there’s the Expert (divided into subspecies from the Bore to the Helpful Person), the Young Family (ranging from the Exhausted to the Aspirational), and Occultists (from Conspiracy Theorist to Craft Woman). Then there’s the Loiterer (including the Erotica Browser and the Self-Published Author), the Bearded Pensioner (including the Lyrca Clad), the The Not-So-Silent Traveller (the Whistler, Sniffer, Hummer, Farter, and Tutter), and the Family Historian (generally Canadians who come to Shaun’s shop in Wigtown, Scotland).

Two bonus sections include Staff and, finally, Perfect Customer - all add up to the funniest sell-and-tell in the house of books.

©2020 Shaun Bythell (P)2020 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Comedic Insight.

Enjoyed the narrator. Author shared experiences with humor and asks the reader to ponder customers. Something I've never done but am sure I will do now when I shop for books. I found this delightful.

So enjoyable

So many truths! And very humorous. I want to visit his shop! I enjoyed the readers accent as well.

Cute!

A couple PG 13 words caught me off guard, but an entertaining book overall. Worth the listen if you are looking for a couple giggles and some insight on the old book trade. Several observations I am sure many will relate to in their own experience in other retail establishments.

Enjoyable quick read

Very enjoyable read for those who like to read people as well as books. I found myself saying, yep, I know someone just like that….

Excellent read for any one who loves books & bookstores!

I worked at a Waterstone’s for two years in my early twenties, I have very “fond” memories of the customers! The experience was monumental, to this day I still tidy up the tables and stacks in any bookstore that I enter, it’s a habit I guess I will never be able to shake. I throughly enjoyed listening to this book!!!!

Enjoyable entertainment

Relaxing entertainment of author’s whimsical classifications of his experiences with shoppers at higher end bookstores

Pretty good

Did I love it? No, but it's a good book to listen to. I didn't know that there's so many kinds of books that I can read or listen to. Anyways I'm going to be listening to some of the other ones he's written.

a quick little listen

Humorous for bookstore goers, owners, and staff. Which type of customer are you? Read/listen on to know!

Boring

I struggled to get through this, it was boring to me. I am a bibliophile with varied interests. This book hardly held my attention.

Hilarious!

So I'm reading a lot of reviews here that are determined to say that this is a mockery of the author's own customers, but this is I feel, more of a celebration. As an avid book lover, there were several categories of customer that I could have fallen into, and every single one of them made me laugh SO HARD just because it is incredibly accurate, even if they carried a negative connotation, which of course, the owner/author is entitled to. To be able to create such effervescent caricatures of the modern ecology of a second hand bookstore takes the loving attention of someone that deeply loves books and the trade of selling them to humans and understands that we are all human, we are all fallible. Instead of going poignant he takes it in a lighthearted direction, and why not, WHY MUST WE BE ALL SO SERIOUS?