Writer takes a shot at running Wigtown's Open Book shop

Kathleen English and Son had a cunning plan to help shift some books in the shape of homemade Irish fruit loaf.

There are stickers with bookish slogans dotted around the cash desk.

“Books are the mirrors of the soul,” says one, attributed to Virginia Wolfe.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies – the man who never reads lives only one,” is pinched from George RR Martin.

Mark Twain’s pitch to the bookshop bumper-sticker game is here, too. “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life,” is his contribution.

Paul English, along with his mother Kathleen, running the Open Book bookshop.

I’d arrived at the Open Book, a unique shop in Scotland’s Book Town, two hours later than planned with my own homespun offering.

“Don’t follow your phone’s sat-nav when driving to Wigtown from Glasgow if you want to get here on time. It’ll take you through the Galloway Forest and you’re probably better going via Girvan,” was the only pearl of fridge-magnet wisdom I could muster when we pulled up outside Scotland’s most desirable second-hand bookshop. Paolo Coelho, eat your heart out.

The Open Book

The Open Book is one of a dozen such shops in this corner of Dumfries and Galloway, run by … whoever wants to run it.

Like most second-hand bookshops, it has a relaxed air, its shelves of tattered tomes home to pre-loved page turners, archaic opuses and forgotten treasures. But unlike any second-hand bookshops, people from all around the world pay to work here.

American author and filmmaker Jessica Fox conceived the idea.

“I came to Wigtown 16 years ago with a dream of working in a bookshop by the sea in Scotland,” said Fox, who includes a role as storyteller at Nasa among her previous jobs.

“I gave up my whole life in LA to do it and ended up moving here. I wanted to create the same experience for those book-curious people who had the same dream of running a book shop for a week, and living upstairs.

“I was working in the jet propulsion laboratory at Nasa and kept having a vision of a woman behind a wooden counter in a really cosy jumper. I started writing it, living in a studio apartment in Los Angeles, and thought, ‘Why am I letting my fictional characters have all the fun?’ So I Googled, then I came over, fell in love and stayed. And I’m still here. And given the number of people who come here, I’m not alone in that dream.”

Kathleen with some of her homemade fruit loaf.

Having researched the reviews on Airbnb – where the waiting list after 10 years is two years long – I knew competition to make a sale in this well-thumbed town was stiff.

On a good day, customer numbers would worry Waterstones. On a bad day, a five-hour shift on a dark November afternoon could feel like Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous offering – One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

I’d decided I’d need something to jump off the pages of my Open Book tenure. I had to find a unique selling point, something that fed more than just the minds of these word-hungry wanderers.

And so it was that this wee Wigtown corner shop became Kathleen English and Son, Booksellers and Bakery, for two days last week.

Running the shop

My mother’s fruit loaf recipe, handed down through the generations from her Irish granny in Moville, Co Donegal, is a McGonnigle family confection which James Joyce himself would have struggled to adequately describe. Like some of the books on our shelves, I’d figured, its rustic delight from bygone times was the perfect lure.

As Oscar Wilde might have said (but didn’t): “All of us are in the gutter, but only some of us can get them belting up North Main Street for a slice of Donegal dynamite.”

Once word got out about our Irish books and baking crossover, they came in their droves – 68 visitors, 15 sales and only crumbs left.

The shop and flat above it are locally owned, and looked after by a team of volunteer custodians. We were greeted by Joyce Cochrane, who owns one of the town’s many surprisingly large bookshops, The Old Bank. She gave us a 20-minute crash course in running a bookshop, from stock familiarisation and merchandising to pavement appeal, window dressing and cashflow. Watch out, Barnes & Noble.

A Galloway girl, Joyce explained how the town had fallen on hard times in the 80s and 90s, following the collapse of employment options in the dairy and whisky industries.

Locals successfully entered a newspaper competition to win backing for regeneration and Book Town status in the late 90s, and chapter one of Wigtown’s literary renaissance began. There are now half a million books, old and new, shelved over two streets, each shop a champion for the other.

Among them is the largest second-hand book store in Scotland, whose owner, author Shaun Bythell, proudly displays an e-reader which he personally strafed with bullets in an act of anti-tech rebellion. They like the smell of books, weathered covers and faded personal dedications round here.

Book festival

Later this month, the population of the town will swell from 800 to 18,000 when the 26th annual literary festival begins, drawing showbiz names like Janey Godley, Alan Cumming and Cerys Matthews and writers like Christopher Brookmyre and Irvine Welsh among many others.

Yet visitors to the Open Book Airbnb are chasing something other than big names. Facing the front door is a wall-to-ceiling map of the world, where incumbents are invited to leave a dot to signify where they’ve come from to run the shop.

Ireland. England. Wales. New Zealand. Hawaii. Canada. Russia. Jordan. Argentina. Venezuela. China. Japan.

Two large journals sit on the cash desk, a compendium of diary entries from each guest shopkeeper. The entries make for unique bedtime reading in the flat upstairs. Some travellers come to the Open Book as if on a quest guided by the pages of self-help manuals, to heal after bereavement, to regroup after relationship breakdown, to celebrate birth.

Some are compelled by romantic fantasies of go-slow lifestyles, escaping the daily grind and having their spirits warmed by the fleeting glow of passing acquaintances.

Others, like us, are here for the sheer fun of playing shop.

Anne Barclay, from Wigtown Festival Company, said: “For a lot of people it’s a dream to own a second-hand bookshop by the sea. And we offer that opportunity. People feel like they’re part of the community. And so many of them come back again. I don’t think people always understand the reason why they’ve come here until they arrive. People read about it, yet every experience is different.”

By the time the employees of Kathleen English and Son had totalled our takings, tallied our sales, counted our footfall and turned off the lights, one quote stuck on the cash desk resonated more than it did when we arrived.

“A day wasted on others,” quoth Charles Dickens, “is not a day wasted on one’s self.”

Quite right, Charlie boy. And the fruit loaf’s good, too.

The Open Book: airbnb.co.uk/rooms/7908227; Wigtown Book Festival runs from September 27 until October 6: wigtownbookfestival.com