I opened the Open Book at 10 a.m. on a cool and overcast Monday in the spring, while nursing a generous hangover. For this I must blame Shaun Bythell, the shaggy-haired owner of Scotland’s largest secondhand bookshop — helpfully, it is called the Bookshop — just down the street. He’d kept me up late the previous night. The Facebook page for Bythell’s shop prominently features an Amazon Kindle, mounted as if a deer head, that he blasted with a shotgun.

My first task as proprietor of the Open Book was one I hadn’t anticipated. What to write on the slate sandwich board that sits out front?

A favorite exhortation came to mind. With chalk I scrawled: “Read at whim! Read at whim! — Randall Jarrell.” For the opposite side, after a bit of puzzling, and given my physical and mental state, I shakily wrote: “Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink. — Barbara Pym.” I set my board outside.

It was time to get a look around. The Open Book is not entirely my kind of used bookstore in that its literature section is modest, dwarfed by the sections for miscellaneous subjects like birds and Scotland and garden design. But there was a nice shelf of Penguins under the register.

My first customers were a middle-aged couple who seemed to be casing the joint for a robbery. I felt sure they would mark me out instantly as an American interloper and groan, but they merely grunted hello and set to browsing.