Bookshop

A customer tests a bookseller with increasingly unlikely titles, altered spellings and authors who seem to have rewritten famous novels. Each correction produces another objection. When a real bird guide finally turns up, the customer insists on removing particular birds, driving the seller to destroy his own stock. Finding another requested book only creates fresh problems, until the desperate bookseller takes responsibility for both the purchase and the reading.

The BFI identifies this as the original performance of a sketch later recycled in Marty and other productions.