Customer Highlights

I find people endlessly fascinating, and I'm lucky to meet so many interesting people in the bookshop.
In just the last few weeks, I've met some lovely people.

There was the Dane who was writing a travel guide book.

There was a physicist who was buying aviation books because he's about to go to New Zealand to re-train as an airline pilot.

A man from Norfolk got talking over a guide book to Peddars Way. He thinks he has a book at home on the archaeology of Norwich with my picture in it! (When I was an archaeologist, I worked on the Castle Mall dig, and got into the Eastern Daily Press holding a Saxon pot).

Then there was the lady who has a Bible museum in Australia. She was buying Bibles in languages I didn't even recognise (and I've worked in Marijana Dworski's shop - I thought I'd seen everything!).

A man from Jersey bought some books about the Channel Islands that included pictures of people he knew. One was the son of the local photographer, with a crowd of lads around a machine gun. He turned to an article in one of the booklets entitled "Do They Ever Come Back?" and told me about one retired German schoolmaster who had. Local archaeologists have opened up some of the World War Two bunkers to the public, and they got talking to this old chap while on the official tour. He hadn't always been a schoolmaster - during the war he had been the commanding officer of those very bunkers! The archaeologists were delighted to meet him, and asked him if they had their interpretation right? He said it was very good, and that there had been a trench in one place, and barbed wire somewhere else - and told them a lot about the German occupation of the Channel Islands that would have been impossible to find out in any other way.

Coming in to sell books to us was the ex-head of the Political section of the BBC, who had worked with John Cole and John Sargent.

And a couple buying American Civil War books told me about the battlefields they'd visited - and that they were lucky enough to go to a full scale battle re-enactment of one of the major battles. "It was in a corn field," they said, "and when we got back to the hotel, we had a shower, and the dust ran off us in grey rivulets."