The Journal on the Counter
I have owned this little second-hand bookshop in Hay for nearly forty years, and the most valuable thing in it has never been for sale. It is a plain green journal that sits beside the till. I have kept it since the day I opened.
In it, I write down every book a customer has loved. Not the title they bought — the title they talked about. When a woman tells me a certain novel changed her life, I write her words down. When a quiet teenager finally admits which chapter made him cry, that goes in too. The journal has grown thick. Whole lives are recorded in it, one book at a time.
Most of those readers have moved on. Some have moved away; a few have died. But their notes remain. On slow afternoons, when the rain keeps the street empty, I open the journal and read. I find a line about a book of poetry from 1991, written by a man whose name I have long forgotten, and suddenly he is standing here again, leaning on the counter, telling me why the last poem broke his heart.
This is the strange pleasure of the work. I sell stories for a living, but the real literature, I have come to think, is this journal — the record of what books did to the people who read them. The shop has never made me rich. The roof needs work, and the heating barely works at all.
Still, I would not trade it. Books pass through my hands and leave again. But the green journal stays, and so, in a way, does everyone who has ever loved a book in this room. I reflect on that, some evenings, and it is enough.