Bookselling: the early years

Going off on one of those irresistible Internet tangents which it is impossible to ignore when a deadline looms, I encountered an fascinating and unrepealed piece of legislation, The Copyright Act (1709). It states that a customer, should he consider the price charged by a bookshop for any particular title to be too high, is entitled to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury and request that he rule on whether or not the price is indeed excessive. Should he deem it to be so, he can fix a lower price and the bookshop shall be fined £5 for every copy henceforth sold at the higher price.

I await my first customer to take advantage of this. I see, however, that www.archbishopofcanterbury.com remains unregistered: perhaps I should set up a bargain bookselling site and claim that prices are set by a higher power.

My star customer of the first Saturday I've worked since Christmas was the gentleman who came in with the details of a book on obtaining one's pilot's licence. He provided all manner of useful bibliographic data to aid in tracking down the correct book, including the fact that it was apparently published in 1900.

It made me think of Wings Over Dagenham, the wonderful Goon Show where Neddy gets carried away building a mangle and accidentally invents the aeroplane - Moriarty laments the passing of the horse-drawn zeppelin - and is immediately contacted by the Air Ministry.