At 9:42 on a Wednesday in early April, the bell above the door of Bartram & Sons in Totnes rings for the fourth time, and the woman who has just come in apologises to the floor before she even looks up.
The floor, in fairness, is part of the apology. It is original deal board, laid in 1834, and it slopes about three inches from the front window to the back wall.
Geoffrey Bartram, who is seventy-one, has owned the shop since 1973. He bought it from a man named Pember, who had owned it since 1948, who had bought it from the widow of the original Bartram, no relation, who had founded it in 1894.
Bartram likes to say that he is the third name on the lease and the fourth surname on the spine of the shop. He says this to almost everyone who asks, and people ask roughly twice a week.
The shop is twelve feet wide at the front and twenty-nine feet deep. There is a back room behind a curtain, sixteen by sixteen, that holds what Bartram calls the stock proper — about 11,000 second-hand titles, mostly hardback, mostly arranged by a system that he has explained on three separate occasions to a graduate student from Exeter without the student understanding any of it.
The front of the shop is new books. Or rather, books published since 1996, which is the year Bartram decided he could no longer in good conscience call anything beyond that point new and have customers come back for it.
He stocks about 1,400 titles at the front. Fiction along the left-hand wall, in tight alphabetical, no breaks for genre. Non-fiction along the right, broken into nine categories that have shifted twice in five decades.
The categories now read: History, Natural History, Travel, Biography, Cookery, House & Garden, Religion (small), Politics (smaller), and a section he calls Local, which contains everything published within forty miles of the shop and runs from a 1908 monograph on the Dart Valley to a 2025 booklet of recipes from a women's institute in Buckfastleigh.
Bartram's daily rhythm has not changed materially since 1989, the year his wife Marjorie died and he moved into the flat above the shop. He opens at 9:30, takes a tea break at 11, eats a cheese sandwich at 1:15, and closes at 5:30 on weekdays, 4 on Saturdays, and never on Sundays.
He does not have a website. He does not have a card reader. He has, since 2019, accepted a bank transfer by handing the customer a slip of paper with his sort code and account number written in pencil, and he has never once been defrauded.
On the Wednesday in question, the first three customers buy a paperback of Stoner, a 1962 Penguin edition of The Aspern Papers from the back room, and a card. Total takings before lunch: seventeen pounds forty.
Bartram does not appear concerned. He reads the Times Literary Supplement at the counter, and when a fourth customer asks whether he has anything by a poet called Alice Oswald, he stands up, goes to the back, and returns within forty seconds with a paperback of Dart, slightly foxed, priced at four pounds.
He charges three. The customer offers a five-pound note. He gives her two pounds back and a postcard of the river.
The Devon market towns — Totnes, Ashburton, Tavistock, Modbury — have lost forty-one independent shops of all kinds in the past decade, according to the regional retail census Bartram quotes from memory. They have, in the same period, gained three new bookshops. Two have closed. One survives, in Ashburton, run by a former teacher named Hannah Pell.
Pell visits Bartram every six weeks. They do not particularly enjoy each other's company, but they exchange stock, swap intelligence about wholesale terms, and complain about the same three publishers' representatives.
What keeps Bartram & Sons open, Bartram will tell you if you stay long enough, is not the front-of-shop sales. It is the back room. He runs a postal-order business in scholarly second-hand titles — primarily Victorian fiction, primarily to academics in North America and Australia — that turns over about eighteen thousand pounds a year and requires roughly four hours of his time a week.
He keeps the catalogue in a series of red ring binders behind the counter. There are seventeen of them. He has been told, repeatedly, that the catalogue should be digitised. He has, repeatedly, not done so.
By 4:30 the shop is busier. A school has let out, and three teenagers come in looking for a copy of The Bell Jar for an English coursework essay. Bartram has two. He sells them both, at a discount he calculates in his head, and gives the third girl a copy of Ariel for nothing.
He tells her she will be glad of it in about six years. She looks unconvinced. She is fifteen.
The shop closes at 5:32. Takings for the day: eighty-seven pounds and change, plus a postal order to a professor in Wellington, New Zealand, for a 1903 edition of Cranford at forty-two pounds and twelve pounds postage.
Bartram totals the day in a leather-bound ledger that goes back to 1973. He has, he says, never missed an entry. He puts the cash in a brown envelope in a drawer, locks the till, and walks upstairs.
Whether Bartram & Sons survives Bartram is an open question. He has no children. The shop is leased, not owned, and the landlord has been polite for thirty years about not raising the rent in line with the market.
Bartram says he has a plan. He will not say what the plan is. It is reasonable to suspect there isn't one, and reasonable also to suspect that the absence of a plan is itself the plan — that the shop will close, eventually, on a Saturday afternoon in some future April, and the bell will ring for the last time, and the floor will keep its slope for whatever comes next.