There is a hinterland to the bookshop not visible to the customers’ naked eye and if you have never volunteered in a charity shop, I am sure you also remain blissfully unaware of what it takes to make the wheels run smoothly.

I am here to enlighten you, just a little bit.

Next door-but-one to our shop is the HSBC and although Oxfam doesn’t bank with them, the counter staff are always happy to give us change – we go in there most days with a £20 notes asking for pound coins, or looking for 50 pennies.

Life on this front got a lot easier when almost everyone used a card to pay, but now cash is creeping back and you would be surprised just how many people want to pay for a £2.49 book with a ten pound note. ( Mostly they want change for car parking.)

We buy them posh biscuits at Christmas as a thank you. ( That’s the bank, not change-hungry customers.)

Next door on the other side is an estate agents and – they hold the shop key for us.

For all the obvious reasons we do not have a key for every volunteer, so we need somewhere for the afternoon volunteer to leave it at the end of the day, and another volunteer to collect it the next morning.

They get thank you biscuits too.

Bet that little bit of administration had not crossed your mind…..

Sometimes we get books donated which fall into the loose ( sometimes very loose) category of erotica.

I know enough about this genre to know that old erotica can be very valuable but most of the time it is not, ( though sometimes rather ‘interesting’) and we can’t/don’t sell it in the shop.

So I collect it, suitably on a top shelf, and when I have a decent pile, I call John who runs the second hand bookshop in town and has fewer qualms than Oxfam, and he gives me a tenner for the lot.

Every little helps…….

We have a jeweller in town who will take our broken gold bracelets and odd silver earrings and give us the scrap value and look at stuff we don’t know how to price and tell us what to do.

Then there is the model railway enthusiast recommended by my hairdresser – see a previous blog – and now needed to work out the latest unearthed bit of models railwaying.

And then there are the volunteers.

One priced all the cameras and camera equipment we unearthed from under a pricing bench.

We sold nearly everything.

He is the man who also refills the pricing guns.

Now this may not sound like much but these bits of dated technology are the way we get a price on the back of every book.

I am sure there must be a a more up-to-date equivalent, but if so they haven’t reached Oxfam yet.

Everyone I know at the shop has had a go a refilling these things with the rolls of blank labels and, with one or two exceptions, have failed.

David gets them sorted in about five minutes. Part of his hinterland was working for a labelling company once in his past – so that was lucky.

We have a couple of volunteers who are/were engineers and that helps with mantling and dismantling things, and making this bit of kit work with that bit of kit.

The Best Beloved has been know to frame the contents of books falling apart and therefore not saleable but with lovely plates/illustrations.

(And we have a pile of old prints so I need to check whether we can get mounts and cellophane and posh them up a bit so we can sell them.

We could do with someone donating a v-shaped print holder – so if you are having a clear out…)

We have a volunteer ( and her husband) who have made a diorama, a fireplace, wallpapered our whole window with wrapping paper…..

We have a few other creative people and one of them has designed some bookmarks.

We had unearthed a load of bookmarks but have used them all up.

And it seems to me that a bookshop should have bookmarks – and some designed by our volunteer and printed at cost by the local printer ( who is very kind) will be a bonus.

We hope to sell them otherwise we will be £100 down ( even at cost). That same nice printer will give me not one invoice for £100, but 10 of £10 so that the takings don’t take one big hit.

Then there was the key man who came to and fro to our shop refining the key cutting so that we didn’t have to change the whole lock. I nod to him and his bulldogs every time I walk past.

And most recent addition to our helpful hinterland is someone who has a hinterland of his own inhabited by coins, banknotes and old maps experts.

But more of that another time.