This is only mildly funny, but it's such a persnickety, curmudgeonly type of humour that I was charmed nevertheless. When I was a student, I worked in the university education library, and honestly... a lot of the stupid questions and a lot of the behaviour of the library's hapless users made parts of this book terribly familiar, though I will say that Bythell at least never had to put up with someone using the public computer next to the children's section to watch hardcore porn. I also, shamefully, recognised a lot of myself in the various customers who wandered round Bythell's secondhand bookshop, so there's some secondhand embarrassment in there as well. 

I just found it very entertaining. It's a year-long diary of a bookshop owner who has to suffer freezing conditions, a cat who is more popular than he is, quirky staff members with a fetish for binned food, and, of course, the customers, who are often more interested in buying books off Amazon than in supporting their local bookshop. Included in each day's entry are the profits for that day, and they are often depressingly low. Bythell reiterates, throughout the book, the deleterious effect that Amazon has on the bookseller ecosystem. It's a good reminder to be more careful in my own buying habits, because I love browsing bookstores and I don't want to see any more of them go under.