Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

I’m a magpie when it comes to books, attracted by thin books with fancy covers and reputations that associate them with bestseller status. An additional draw for this book is that it is not just about book lovers, but also about bibliophiles who have been categorised into seven types of people. Although I am a free spirit, I paradoxically gravitate towards systems of sorting people into personality types like MBTI and DISC. Anyway, I put aside ‘The Cappuccino Years’ to tackle this first.

There’s something about the British’s sense of humour that I absolutely adore. It’s like Shaun Bythell makes the most unflattering assessments of people in such a deadpan manner that your impulse is to LOL instead of furrowing your eyebrows. And it’s how he nonchalantly drops caustic bombshells when you least expect it that elevates the hilarity that I derived from this book.

Besides his brutally honest observations of human behaviour, Shaun Bythell also regaled me with his anecdotes accumulated from twenty years of ownership of his second-hand bookstore. I also quite relished how he name-dropped famous British authors - past and present alike - which rendered a good view of how he viewed the literary world through his lens. Also, he obviously knows a thing or two about the life of overstretched parents because he wrote “a book so short, so perfect and so digestible that it might as well have been written for parents of young children” (pg 31). I finished reading it leisurely while sipping bubble tea. Blissfully uninterrupted because the boy was at school. The sense of accomplishment from finishing a book cannot be overstated. Sense of achievement deepened by learning this chic French word ‘betes noires’ from him.

Oh, did I find myself in his descriptions of the seven types? It’s hard to say because these days, I only patronise bookstores and hang around the bargain section, trying to find the best picks that will yield the most value for money using the book vouchers I win from some giveaway competition. LOL.