This book, which is good in parts, is probably best read in small sections. Written as a diary between early 2014 and early 2015, it includes too much repetition about opening hours, if the author’s idiosyncratic assistant was late and if his internet was working.

Shaun Bythell bought the bookshop – which is named The Bookshop – in Wigtown in Scotland’s south-west Galloway region in 2001 and has run it ever since. It’s Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop, with 100 000 volumes. During the town’s annual book festival, The Bookshop wines and dines around 200 visiting authors.

The author paints himself as a misanthrope, even using the shop’s Facebook page to make unfavourable comments about his customers. He is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his eccentric permanent assistant, who scrounges food from a skip behind a supermarket and wears a ski suit in winter because the bookshop building is so cold.

The most entertaining parts of the book are the extracts from a 1936 George Orwell essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’, which head the entries for each month. Bythell’s acerbic humour is a bit heavy-handed, sometimes crossing that fine line that divides wit from malice as he details conversations with customers, or those who pore through his stock, then announce they’ll get the book cheaper online.

He denounces Amazon, which he says has consumed everything in its path, but he must use the internet to benefit from online orders.

He has found that books about railways have proved to be the most popular titles in his shop and, because he buys most of his stock from deceased estates, sometimes there are treasures to be found. His Random Book Club, in which members receive random books each month, sounds like fun.

And the fact that he shot a Kindle, then framed it for display, says all that’s necessary about this passionate bibliophile.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville