For while, there has been a dearth of donations of old and interesting books to our Oxfam shop – but recently there have been some treats.

I should (re) mention that old and interesting is the category on the till – quite a lot of the time, old does not equal very interesting at all.

Anyway, with Christmas gone and the leftover crackers, candles, cards and so on, consolidated into a few SALE shelves, we had space which needed to be filled with old and interesting so all donations have been welcomed.

Please bear with me, this does get a bit more interesting later on, and to prove the point, here is a lovely picture:

Meanwhile, a fellow volunteer had mentioned that in the Winchester shop (always to be envied given that it has tourists and university students, which we don’t) had taken plates ( pictures) out of decrepit books and put them in mounts and had them for sale.

We could do that, I thought.

And, by coincidence or the inscrutable movement of the universe, whichever you prefer, a donation came in which would be an ideal candidate.

It was Grimm’s fairy tales illustrated by W Heath Robinson – falling apart and some child had scrawled with crayon over some of the pages, making it unsaleable except to someone who wanted to take out the plates and frame them….

My best beloved is something of a star amateur picture framer so you can see where this is going.

He said, though, the plates were not in great condition and anyway were a bit ‘wishy-washy.’

I was deflated but not despondent on the basis that wishy-washy was better than nothing.

But then we had a treat, actually two treats.

As you know I am an amateur upholsterer – oh what crafts people we both are – anyway, I found this in the back of a book amongst several boxes of books – all old and about Paris.

( I have put a shelf of them out but I think you can only do one such shelf in a Petersfield bookshop – obviously if we were in Winchester…)

So, French upholsterer to her majesty – presumably Victoria – and doing work for Mr Franck Boggs – great name.

Someone will like that framed, I thought.

And then another book came in, and it had already fallen apart, but what fantastic plates.

It turns out these were produced by two brothers who approached Dent with what they had done, and the publisher said, ‘oh yes please.’

We have the first edition of their first book – but all the pages are loose and couldn’t be sold as a book.

(If you want to know more about Maurice and Edward, here is a link
http://www.avictorian.com/Detmold_Charles_Maurice.html)

They were influenced by Japanese art – very popular at the time – and you can see it in the style.

So, these delights will be framed by the BB and will be the stars of my new bookshop venture. ( I may well keep the book cover for us.)