Month: September 2023

Planning In Advance – do you have revolver?

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We start thinking the unthinkable very early on in the Oxfam bookshop – we think about Christmas from August onwards.

Yes, I can imagine your rolling eyes, and indeed the rolling eyes of professional shop designers who obviously start thinking about Christmas in January.

But bear with me, if you can.

So, long-time readers may know that from August (maybe even July) we start putting aside books which are in such lovely condition a customer could buy them and give them to someone who would never know they were second hand. ( And we can get a bit more money for them.)

Mind you, I have to say that most of our customers say they are on a mission to buy from charity shops, or they have a family contract to buy second hand books to ‘indulge’ in the Icelandic tradition of having Christmas Eve when everyone in the house eats and reads a book.

Or they are looking for ‘table presents’ – ‘do you have a book which will interest my godson who is really into physics, and my niece who is into jewellery-making, and my friend who loves ghost stories?’ etc etc  

That was a fun hunt last Christmas Eve, and the lovely customer-couple bough £50 worth of books.

But the primary issue is making the window look good. Really good.

And that is the primary job of my great colleague who, I may tell you, made Narnia in our window last year.

She does the window displays and I do the table displays (which is also in the window but requires a lot less effort.)

So, what to do this year.

Now, my Best Beloved will say that I have lots of bright ideas but few ever make it into reality unless there is someone picking them up and doing what is needed.

And, that is (sadly) true – lots of my good ideas have thus fallen by the wayside.

But my idea for the Christmas window seems to have got traction.

Want to know what it is?

Oh, go on then.

So we have decided to do a Cluedo window.

There will be the dead Mr Black slumped over a desk in the ‘library’ in the window.

And the nod to Christmas will be a fake window in the real window ‘looking through’ to snow.

There will be lots of books about murder mysteries on his ‘library’ bookshelves.

And, thanks to the BB suggestion, we will have clues around the shop.

For those of you who don’t know the Cluedo board game – are there any such people? – we are going with the early version.

( Here in case you need it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cluedo_characters )

So, Mrs White was the cook so there will be old-fashioned ladles hanging from the cookery book section and a book in that section with a cover (we will have made) called Mrs White’s Country House Recipes.

I have arranged to borrow a vicar’s collar from ( not entirely surprisingly, a vicar I know) and it will be in our religious books section with a bible ‘owned’ by the Rev Green.

Miss Scarlett is proving a challenge so far because although we take clothes donations and sell them online, not many people associate us with a clothes shop so my hunt for a bright red evening dress is proving a bit difficult. 

Do let me know if you have one to spare.

Colonel Mustard will be a pot of Colman’s mustard in the section of military history and somewhere/somehow we will make/find a suitable moustache to go alongside.

Mrs Peacock is going to be peacock feathers around the shop. But again, if anyone has a peacock model/trinket/statue/garden adornment they don’t need, I would love to borrow.

For Professor Plum, we will have a mortar board and (maybe) a gown alongside a pile of academic books.

And then we are on to the weapons.

We need a dagger – well the BB has one (actually several) so that is covered but we are not supposed to have those in the shop so that will need some ‘display finessing’.

A candlestick – we have at least several we can lend to the shop.

Lead piping – well, we will make something which looks like that but that can’t actually injure a volunteer or customer.

Rope is easy-peasy but again, we will try and ensure that no volunteer is injured/murdered in the making of this Christmas display……

What is proving really hard is finding a fake revolver – today’s parents don’t like their children playing with guns these days.

In my part of Deepest Sussex there is a man whose business is making posh shooting weapons but I am not sure that Oxfam will wear me borrowing a beautifully designed real thing…..

Now, just as a PS, we have had no end of Cluedo sets donated to the shop in the past.

Do we have one now, no of course not.

But a quick WhatsApp messages to my village has turned one up. Of course it did.

There are times when I really like being a Reluctant Sussex Housewife.

Collections

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It has been a day of brilliant collections in our Oxfam shop. 

For example,

Most of the time, we get donations which are an assortment of what people have accumulated – 1970s cookery books ( but not those which are now worth something), The Reader’s Digest Book of Cats, browned paperbacks – Neville Shute shunted against Catherine Cookson etc etc.

Dated management accountancy text books, unread self-help books, the complete collection of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels – all with numbered labels so you knew in which order to read them – but all left in ‘our garage which got a bit damp but they will dry out eventually.’ No, they won’t or at least they will dry out over a long time and in no condition to sell. 

But there are some collections which make a Thursday morning a delight.

This maybe new to you but the publisher Collins published a series of books branded New Naturalists which is, in case you didn’t know:

Collins New Naturalist series is the longest-running and arguably the most influential natural history series in the world with over 100 volumes published in over 60 years. 

Now some of these are quite rare and therefore valuable – for reasons you may to want to be bothered with the rare ones are those printed in the middle of the series.

It began in 1945 with Butterflies. And from this you can see that one of the delights of the books is the beautiful covers. They are very lovely.

We had nowhere near the complete collection see below, but we did have more in a donation than we usually get.

No, that is an image of what we would love to have – that collection worth £6,000. Ours, not so much….

At the same time, our ace book-sorter told me of a carrier bag he had found full of King Penguins.

Now you maybe familiar with Penguin books – so popular with interior design Instagram aficionados – never mind the quality (of the writing) see the width of orange vintage books on your shelves.

Not that I am judging of course – and have to admit I have a shelfful.

Anyway, King Penguins are an eclectic series of books hardback, slim volumes published between 1939 and 1959 and were monographs ( short books on specific subjects)

The Carvings in Exeter cathedral, Edible Fungi and indeed Poisonous Fungi, Russian Icons, Book of Spiders, Ballooning, Early British Railways, The Isle of Wight – well if you want to know the full list see here https://penguinchecklist.wordpress.com/early-series/king-penguins/

So, taking this list and publication dates, I spent a couple of hours going through what we had been given – did we have a full collection and were they all first editions?

That would have been a say, £200 collection.

But…..

We had one which wasn’t a first edition and more importantly, we had one of the books missing.

Really? Just one book? 

The should have been 76 books, was a pile of 75.

I looked it up – The Book of Scrips, in case you were wondering. I could buy a decent one online for £10 and I thought about it …. but not for long.

And some of the 75 ( but not many) were not in the best of rude health – spines a bit tattered….

So, I decided to put them down on the table with the New Naturalists – collections akimbo – with a sign saying this was a (very) nearly complete set but missing one book. And we wished anyone who bought them and went searching for the missing book, good luck and our best wishes.

I was at the back of the shop, sorting new donations when a colleague told me someone wanted to buy the books – they had been on the table for, say, 15 minutes.

The lovely woman who bought them had never heard of them, knew nothing about them, had fallen in love with some of the titles and lovely cover designs, was more than happy to pay the £50.

And as a determined charity shopper she was planning on refusing the charms of buying the missing book on the internet but would consider it a challenge/treasure hunt to find a copy.

She promised to come and tell me when/if she found it.

And finally, for those of us who recently heard about a type of concrete which seems to be a) dodgy b)in some cases dangerous and c) not entirely taken seriously in the budget for repairs Government decisions – repairs aren’t that vote catching after all.

These advisory leaflets were issued by the then government……. just saying.