Shaun Bythell, the Scottish bookseller famous for shooting a Kindle, is coming to Romania in early December. He will have an event in Timișoara on Monday, December 4, at 6:00 PM, at La Două Bufnițe Bookstore, followed by another in Bucharest.
The Bucharest meeting with Shaun Bythell is scheduled for December 7, starting at 6:30 PM, at Cărturești Verona, in the English Salon. The dialogue with Shaun Bythell, conducted in English, will be hosted by Vlad Niculescu, one of Romania’s well-known and respected librarians, co-founder of the independent bookstore ‘Anthony Frost,’ and currently the manager of ‘Cărturești & friends’ bookstore.
On this occasion, the Romanian edition of ‘Confessions of a Bookseller,‘ the most recent translation, a journal written among books for the reader encountered in antiquarian shops and bookstores, will be launched. It is considered ‘one of the funniest memoirs written by a bookseller,’ according to critics from The New York Times.
Shaun Bythell’s first book translated into Romanian, ‘The Diary of a Bookseller,’ was among the first six titles that debuted in the Anansi. World Fiction collection in September 2020. The book, offering a perspective on the relationship between small business owners in the book world and giants like Amazon, was enthusiastically received by Romanian readers, ranking among the best-selling titles published in translation by Pandora M Publishing.
Since 2001, Shaun Bythell has been the owner of ‘The Bookshop,’ an antiquarian store in Wigtown, the largest of its kind in Scotland. In 2010, he created the store’s Facebook page, where he shares witty observations about the absurd questions, quirky incidents, or malicious comments from his customers.
He made his literary debut in 2018 with ‘The Diary of a Bookseller,’ documenting the daily events in the life of a seller of old books, a perspective quite different from the idyllic version we all have in mind. In 2019, he published ‘Confessions of a Bookseller,’ followed by ‘Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops’ in 2020. Both ‘The Diary of a Bookseller’ and ‘Confessions of a Bookseller’ were translated by Mihaela Buruiană.”