So, it has been a bit of a week in the bookshop, a bit of a week indeed.
There are a lot of meanwhiles in this blog, I am warning you dear reader, but there is an update on the green sofa if you have been reading assiduously……
Let’s start with classical music. Our volunteer who does classical music was infuriated last year when the cat took away his carefully curated shelf of Christmas gift CDs which he had been saving for some months.
These are not those – just in case you are a classical music afficiando
No consolation or advance warning, a refusal to clear any other shelves to make room, just the explanation that there needed to be room for Oxfam new goods – gifts and the like – and ‘anyway classical music never sells.’
Well, this year the mice promised that the classical music Christmas gifts’ shelf would be preserved.
On Thursday, I got a call from that volunteer to say £250 worth of those curated and saved CDs had sold to one customer.
Meanwhile, another volunteer who sells jewellery online for us took her ‘collection’ of bits and pieces (odd earrings, a cigarette case etc) to a local jeweller for scrap value, and was hoping for about £50.
She got £215.
We were on a roll.
Meanwhile, don’t say I didn’t warn you, the model railway needed to be put on the table.
The very nice model railway expert came in late on Monday afternoon – we are closed then but that gives us time to do the table, the window, generally tarting up the shop without customers getting in the way.
He and I spent a couple of hours pricing up and presenting model railway stuff on the table.
I was very grateful, and pleased and then later in the week, he texted me to say he had Covid.
So, that means I have been in house-isolation ( bulbs getting planted.)
Meanwhile, it has sold really well – another bonus for the week.
Meanwhile, we have started on the green sofa.
And I have plans for the next few weeks.
Next week will have a jacket, a pair of wellies, a book The Perfect Puppy, Jess’s spare bed, dog treats, a lead and collar – you get the idea – and a photo of Jess in her bad days….
Meanwhile, when sorting some books the other day, we found a book called The Husband’s Mistake. We thought we could have a shirt with a lipstick smear on it.
And then I found these.
(Now, in case you don’t know Hemingway and Gellhorn were married and he was just a bit unfaithful…)
Meanwhile, the 1777 map.
So, we have got good photos of it and they are now with someone who lives in our village and who has a specialist auction business.
And, they are going to someone in Sotheby’s and another auction house – and we will see. But for the time being, here are the proper photos……
Decent coffee from coffee shop over the road for me, Jim and Ian
One of the shop floor heater is broken so a call to Oxfam Property Services – always an answer machine.
Go downstairs mention this to Ian who says ‘no I switched it off’ – not at the usual switch but at the heater, with the aid of walking stick. (Yes it is high up.)
Leave another message cancelling Property Services.
Billiard cues: Ian discovered them, I have had no luck in finding out what they are worth so hand over to Ian who says he will approach local snooker club
Key: So, we needed to get a new key cut because we had to send a shop key to the new Oxfam contractor which will be taking away our unsaleable books and clothes.
(Why they couldn’t get the keys from the old contractor is a question indeed.)
There is a long story about getting that key cut, but suffice it to say with the help of a generously bearded man with two very nice bulldogs, we did, and sent it off.
Meanwhile the old contractor did a collection but left no plastic crates for us to put books in for the next collection – and there were a lot of books.
Call to them who say they haven’t left any because their contract is up at the end of this week. But today is Thursday and we have two collections a week – and the second one is on Friday.
They call back to say they will collect if we leave the books in any plastic crates, boxes, or bags for life. So, we do.
Call Oxfam and ask for more details and find out the new company are coming (surprisingly) during the night to collect. When?
Are we getting two collections a week?
Apparently the new company should have been in touch and done a shop visit. They haven’t.
Call them and am told the area manager for our area, Laura?Lauren? will call me back – she doesn’t.
Have to call my fellow ‘acting manager’ and tell her about this in case Laura?Lauren calls on Friday.
If not, will add to Monday’s list which includes – model railway display ( see previous blog); area manager’s leaving coffee; getting her flowers and making sure everyone has signed our certificate of thanks; picking up a volunteer because the buses from her village won’t deliver her in time for the leaving do; messaging a volunteer on universal credit to make sure he comes to the shop first so that one of us can walk over to aforementioned leaving do and make sure he doesn’t have to pay for his coffee; calculating and printing out a briefing on the week’s takings and Christmas lunch, hoovering because we are not open on a Monday etc etc.
Meanwhile, I have bought an open/closed sign for the shop because even though we are not open, we use Monday to re-do the table and window and re-stocking and clearing books donated on Saturday etc and lots of people rattle on the door assuming because there are people in the shop, we are open.
Ask Ian to put it up.
Make more coffee and tea.
Start to put together a box of books to use as front facers. That means books on stands which show the customer their front cover. They sell better than those just showing their spine. Look in any bookshop and you will see front-facers.
We are now using all those books which are in pristine condition and that we have been collecting since August.
Send a text thanking the volunteer who sorted out the Christmas-themed books and DVDs we have also been collecting into cookery, crafts, children’s, paperback fiction etc piles.
Put out front facers – including a very nice copy of Durer’s engravings on art shelves.
When I deliver his next coffee, Ian has replaced it with a Max Ernst book…..
Jim is pricing the large crate we have been amassing, since August, of stocking-filler books. Humour, little books, off-beat books.
They only sell this time of year. But, and it is a big but, they need to all be front-facing to sell and we have no spare space. Will need thinking about.
Jim and I pause so that I can show him the 1777 map we have found (see previous blog.)
We have been sent, as have many shops around the country apparently, three large boxes of Tottenham Hotspur ( a football club in case you were wondering) merchandise.
Mainly for children.
I am wondering just how many young or very young Spurs fans there are in Petersfield…
Sort them into bags because we need those big boxes for books we are sending off ( see above), and price them all.
Find some woolly hats which don’t shout Spurs so budge up some Oxfam Christmas crackers, and price them, and put them out.
Check emails and find out that two boxes of end of season clothes are waiting for us in the Joules shop down the road.
Need to organise collecting them, but Jim has just left and that will wait until Monday.
Sort some books and find Asterix and the actress – not really saleable in this day and age.
We have used my mother’s old Kenwood mixer – which I used a lot growing up but has been in our cellar for a while – as a prop in the cookery themed window.
Put it for sale on local facebook group and the person who bought it came in to collect it, and tell me her mum will be delighted – and quite a bit more chat – still it boosts Ian’s takings for the morning.
Spend a bit of time working out shift cover – one volunteer has a step-daughter who needs her broken shoulder operating on so the family needs to self-isolate, another has an impending knee operation which will count him out for say six weeks, another has a major operation coming up and we will need to cover for her, as well as making sure she has a nice ‘care package’ from us.
(On that, as she is a beekeeper I am thinking one of the components should be Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution which is about an aged Sherlock Holmes. It is lovely and not too long and has quite a bit about bees in it. He is a great writer and I would read a shopping list he wrote. So, I nip round to the not-second-hand bookshop and order a copy.)
Another volunteer, David, arrives. ( He has just had a tooth repaired and wanted some distraction from a numb mouth and several days of painkillers.)
He is a cameraman in ‘real life’ so I have asked him whether he will take a photo of our large and valuable map with a wide angled lens and from up a ladder.
Our antiquarian expert volunteer has said he is no expert on this, but the map should be worth say £750.
I am wondering about contacting a local auction house who have waived their charges before, to see if it might do better – you only need two rich people to want something, and with internet bids who knows……
David calls his friend who is interested in old maps who says send a photo to the man he knows in Sothebys and we will get a free valuation.
Arrange to come in next Wednesday ( when I was hoping for a day off) to do the photos.
Back to the green sofa. You may recall I wanted to use my garage-stored green sofa for tableaux.
Idea being that someone has just got up to answer the door, and everything is left as it would be on the sofa.
See a previous blog for more ideas on what we could do.
Anyway, have arranged for it to come to the shop on Sunday thanks to my dog-walking friend whose husband has a vehicle big enough to get it in.
Check notes left by another two volunteers on what they think is the tableaux we should start with.
They go for the throw, a packet of lemsip, a mug, a pair of slippers and a book.
The only book, the only book, it could be is Cold Comfort Farm ( not least as I have read that many, many times when I am feeling under the weather.)
Do we have a copy – of course not!
Nip to the second-hand bookshop and buy one from them.
Make a list of what I will need from home to make this work – cushions, hot water bottle, my old slippers etc.
On the way back, I nip into the butcher as we have eight people for lunch tomorrow……….
For anyone (at all) still with me on this, now for the models railway and typewriter – not a sentence I would have expected to write.
I knew nothing about model railways but an Oxfam instinct made me say yes when someone donating boxes of books said, ‘By the way, do you want some model railway stuff?’
And, I have watched enough (actually more than enough) Antiques Roadshow to know that can be valuable stuff.
It came in four large boxes and an old suitcase, and I went to get my haircut.
‘Don’t suppose you know anyone who knows about model railways?’ I said.
‘Strange you should say that,’ said my hairdresser, ‘ One of my kid’s godfather is a model railway enthusiast.’
So, the lovely model railway enthusiast and ex-real-train-driver came to help and spent an afternoon looking at what we had.
Lots of it is not of much value but will make a lovely display on the table.
Some of it, we might be able to sell online.
We have track by the plenty – straight and curved; we have signal boxes and signals; we have a suspension bridge; we have old 125 carriages; we have freight wagons; we have christmas trees; we have grass coloured stuff and pink stuff for putting blossom on your model trees….
(And that is more semi colons than I have used in a long time.)
And, I now know considerably more about model railway stuff than I ever thought I would.
I do know quite a bit about typewriters.
When I was a young journalist, shortly after the Boer War, we had never heard of desktop computers.
We had shared or communal typewriters – never quite enough to go round if we were all in newsroom at once.
And indeed, one of the (shared) typewriters was a really old ‘upright’ one which probably explains why I bash the keys of my Mac too hard indeed.
not quite as old as this but a very close cousin
When you were on the day shift you went into the newsroom and grabbed a typewriter and hoped to get a half way decent one.
One of them, I remember, was so well used the ‘e’ had worn out. So, once you had typed your story, you had to go back through it pencilling in all the ‘e’s missing from your deathless prose.
For every story we wrote, we had two sheets of very thin, poor paper and sandwiched inside was a sheet of carbon paper so we had a copy of what we wrote in case the newspaper got sued and needed to prove what we had written.
Some (indeed sometimes, most) of what we wrote ended up on the spike – literally a sharp spike on the news editor’s desk on which he (and it was always a he) impaled stories that were not going to make it into the next day’s paper.
If you wanted to look up some background to a story, you would go to the librarian and ask for the relevant packet.
And it was a cardboard packet of newspaper clippings and sometimes spiked copy which he ( and it always was a he) had thought to save and file under that particular packet heading – it was sometimes (often) a lottery as to what was in any packet and how relevant its contents might be to what you wanted to research.
We would have thanked any god for Google.
So, after the rinse aid and tins of salmon, I was very gratified to find this.
It turns out to be worth £50. ( Thanks to those very same gods for eBay.)
We will put it on the table with books that would (probably) have been written on a typewriter – not a quill, or fountain pen or a laptop.
So, Hemmingway, Enid Blyton, F Scott Fitzgerald, E E Nesbit, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, C S Lewis, Sylvia Plath and any others I can rootle around and find.
The danger of this plan is that the typewriter sells immediately and customers look rather bemused at the random collection of books – but for £50 I am willing to risk that.
There will indeed be an update on the map and coins as promised but for now, something which happens, if not every day, then often enough to be one of the main reasons I volunteer in the bookshop.
So, you arrive in one morning and find boxes stacked high of donations and you glance at them to see enough damp, dated, battered, unsaleable, books to make your heart sink.
And you come across one which seems to fit that bill.
But then you open it and it is a book of oddities and delights – and must have some stories to tell but I can’t tell them for you.
Here it is.
Dated art books are not often very valuable but this one may have interest.
Let’s start with the bookplate.
Desmond Young was not, having read his obituary, the kind of man you would have thought bought art books.
Still, he clearly owned this one and his bookplate seems to show a devoted sailor returning to his loving wife after long journeys afar.
Maybe this is his (later) widow, and how he thought of them both.
And then there are the two sheets of receipts which have nothing at all to do with art or the book.
They are about furnishings being imported (see the import stamps) presumably for his house, in Le Beaupre, Sark..
I thought I would have a look at what his house looked like.
I put in the postcode and I searched Google street view but they had nothing. I looked up the address and history and found not much.
Now this was a quick fizz of a search so if you are more interested, here is the postcode: GY10 1SH.
Meanwhile Desmond Young ( or maybe his wife) was ordering a large comfortable velour sofa, a two metre grey rug, and some 7 metres of legarde ordinaire from Charles Mellon-Charrier ‘upholsterer to her majesty, by special appointment.’
This is dated 1924 so we are talking, apparently, Mary of Teck (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, wife of George V.)
And we haven’t got to the book yet.
Just to be a bit technical: it is foxed which means it has brown spots on some pages, despite the spine coming apart, it is tightly bound which means the pages are all holding together, the plates (pictures, and we will be coming to those) are attached one side only, each plate is numbered and there is an index showing XXVI (26) coloured plates and 15 black and white plates.
Bet you never needed to know that much about what has to be written up when you put a book to be sold online.
Each plate has a short description of why it is good and Charles Marriott has some pages to explain his stuff.
Now here will be a some of those plates.
I have to say, being no expert, I have never heard of half these artists, with my Antiques Roadshow addiction.
But I think they are pretty damned impressive and I am betting that someone will buy the book to take out the plates and frame them and if it doesn’t sell, I will bring it home and ask the BB to do just that.
Apparently this is called Lip Salve….
‘What?’ I hear someone cry, ‘ how can you rip a book apart?’
Well, here is why.
If it doesn’t sell our option is to send it off to be re-cycled. I would rather rip it apart and make pictures which we can sell and get some money for someone who needs food, water, housing, education.
But of course, of course, I would rather sell it to someone who will treasure it and its history.
But if and when it sells on Oxfam Online, who knows what the buyer will do with it……
In the greater scheme of things, see also the climate crisis, a week of full-on stuff in an Oxfam shop is small beer.
But for those of us doing that week, it adds up.
And it is another week of unearthing stuff. It seems we have not (just yet) plumbed the depths of ignored treasures in the shop.
And fishcakes.
For those (few) who are following this closely, a bit of an update.
Though it is not absolutely certain, it looks like the cat is not coming back so the mice have a few things up our sleeves – remember the green sofa? it maybe happening – but more of that another time.
So, we have billiard cues, an 18th century large map, some more coins, a book or two, and a vintage typewriter to come.
So, let’s start.
In the corner next to the back door are some poles propped up and among them I spotted something which I thought might be a large and ancient telescope.
Now, dear reader, you might think that I should have looked closely at such a potential treasure but a customer needed serving and I got distracted and anyway it had been there for years and years so wasn’t going anywhere fast.
I mentioned it to the volunteer on the till and then went upstairs to do something, hopefully something important and useful.
A while later, he told me it was a billiard cue and he thought it was Edwardian.
Mmmm, interesting.
Next day, he tells me it is made by Riley so classy stuff and I make a mental note to do some research.
Again, I went upstairs to do something urgent/important/I meant to do last week but ran out of time.
Half an hour later, he buzzed up on the ‘intercom’ to tell me someone had just donated another one.
What? The original cue had been standing there for years and the week we start to look at it, another one comes in….
The other volunteer is now volunteering to take them both to the local snooker club to get some idea of what they are worth.
I am not sure how we would sell online as how do you send something which is nearly as tall as I am…….
Meanwhile, we have more coins and notes.
There is a rule, at least in our shop, if you put something in the window or on the table you get more of them.
History books, cookery books, jigsaws, military history, paintings etc – and in this case coins and notes.
So, if you are an assiduous reader, you will recall that we have had a money tree in the window and alongside we have had bags of old British coins – farthings, pennies, shillings, florins, half crowns, threepenny bits, silver sixpences.
And they have sold – not least to people who want ‘real’ coins in their Christmas puddings.
Anyway, a large ice-cream box of coins duly arrived.
I went in early to see if I could make up some more bags of coins we could sell then before the table changes theme – and then send the rest off to Guildford Oxfam where they have a numismatist who can value them.
Though we don’t get the value attributed to our shop.
Yes I know, I know, it is money for Oxfam so who cares which shop it comes from?
Well with a bit of embarrassment at this confession, I do.
So, of course I sent some off to Guildford, but I have kept back the George II and George III coins, the coins with Jewish symbols which look too old to be Israeli, commemorative Victoria coin/medal to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the Birmingham courts building and so on.
I rang our antiquarian expert to ask if he new any coin experts and whilst I was at it, did he want a look at our old map (more of that later) and he said, ‘Well no, but I know a bit about coins, I will come and have a look.’
At this point, I need to tell you he hasn’t been in yet so there is not immediate resolution to this story but I will keep you up-dated.
And likewise with the map and the model railway. But you will get fishcakes.
So the map was found by another volunteer.
I had been clearing out yet another stuffed set of filing trays when she asked me to stop.
OK I thought, she doesn’t feel it is appropriate to clear out the manager’s filing whilst he is away.
But I was wrong.
‘I love clearing out stuff, so can I do it.’
Last week she got round to it and, among the endless stuff to be thrown away, she found a couple of maps and an old guide to London.
One of the maps was a 1907 Post Office issued map of London – but it had come apart into two pieces and is probably worth only about £20 to someone who has a big wall to fill.
The guide is nice but not worth much either.
The other map, however, is as big as our kitchen table, dated 1777, a map of the 25 miles around Windsor, original and a real delight.
Now, and here is another coincidence ( remember the billiard cues?)
I went down onto the shop floor and was talking to the volunteer (the same volunteer who had spotted the cues) and told him about the discovery of the map.
The only customer in the shop was a young man of about 20.
‘I know a bit about maps,’ he said,’ Could I have a look?’
Of course he could.
He said it was not a copy and it was made in a time when turnpike roads were becoming more common and King George III had held a competition to get maps made – and of course, George lived in Windsor.
There was a flurry of map-makers doing their stuff and some were apparently more fast than accurate.
And indeed, though we have not looked for inaccuracies, it is certainly keen to be nice to the king.
Want to see it?
I will get a better photo when we can lay it out on the floor and get a wide-angled shot from up a ladder, but this will have to do for now.
I am not sure what counts as a remarkable hill…. but clearly the turnpike roads and cross roads were counted as important.
A similar map is for sale in a posh shop in Curzon Street for £750. Whether ours will be of that value remains to be seen.
Now to fishcakes.
So, I have finally finished clearing out our stockroom.
It is not big. Think very small prison cell or reasonably sized pantry.
It has been ‘home’ to a lot of stuff which really needed to be cleared out – a lot.
Getting to the final stretch of clearing out I uncovered a vintage typewriter (but you will have to wait for that story), and a small bin.
In it was some rinse aid, a packet of pegs, some Gaviscon and three tins of pink salmon.
Really?
I presume it was some shopping that someone left behind and the manager put it in the stockroom and then, as with so much other stuff, promptly forgot it and/or ignored it.
I used on for our supper before I took the photo
I bought the cans – still in date I hasten to add.
So, to make fishcakes for you and the neighbours, take a can or two of ‘uncovered’ pink salmon.
Cook and mash ( coarsely) some potatoes with a good ‘dollop’ of butter – but no milk.
Add them together with some nice capers, finely chopped parsley or coriander if you have that instead, and some dill if you have it – dill is really good.
Make into cakes with your hands – not too big – and put in the fridge for a while/overnight…
Lightly beat and egg ( or two if you are doing lots.)
On a plate put some plain flour or panko breadcrumbs.
Dip each fishcake in egg and then coat with four or breadcrumbs.
Fry in oil on moderate heat and serve with salad and the story of the day to your Best Beloved – and even he was a bit surprised to find Oxfam had provided supper.
thereluctanthousewife 