One of the things I like about working in an Oxfam bookshop is the fact that you never know what is going to be donated.

(Mind you it was rather a surprise when a woman came up to the till and asked if we take books – mmm, yes otherwise we would not be a bookshop at all….’Well, lots of charity shops don’t take books these days, you know,’ she said.)

I am convinced if you wait long enough a book on every subject under the sun will pass through our hands – we have recently had a small book on the history of barbed wire and another on Estonian lace knitting patterns just by way of example.

But there are books of which I will have handled hundreds over the years – thankfully the stream of Jeremy Clarkson’s has dried up, but there are many, many regulars which come in with such regularity they are old friends.

We get bouts of best sellers – about two years after they have become popular – Eleanor Ferrante for example, and the once very popular Fifty Shades of Grey – there was one Oxfam bookshop which made a child’s fort out of spare copies of that.

Don’t get those hardly at all now. 

Many of our books come from people downsizing, or moving, or from adult children clearing their parents’ house and that means we get collections – the cricket mad father-in-law’s, or aged travel guides to far flung places once visited, or the complete oeuvre of John Grisham.

And every week or so we have to change the window displays to keep our shop looking good.

So, with no ability to order any books, or even know what is going to come through the door, we are mothers of invention, making do, lateral thinking, etc.

I had what I thought was rather a good idea. 

In the coming months we will be doing a window display on travel – we keep donated Rough Guides because although dated a) the covers are attractive and b) whilst hotels and restaurants will change over time, monuments and natural wonders do not.

We also have an old oak table in the window and I thought, to compliment the travel guides and travel writing in the window, I would do a table on fictional journeys:

Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Murder on the Orient Express, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Space Odyssey and indeed, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland ( though that might have to be kept back because I am planning a table based on the Mad Hatter’s tea party.)

We could have Robinson Crusoe, Life of Pie, On The Road, The Time Machine, Journey to the Centre of the World, Canterbury Tales, Treasure Island, Swallows and Amazons, The Phantom Tollbooth, Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz, His Dark Materials trilogy.

Well, you get the idea and indeed I was rather chuffed by my idea. Not least because these are not rare books on the whole.

We always have at least some of these books but when I went to look I found one copy of Gulliver’s Travels and a colleague suggested Passage to India. 

Now that is not a book we have very often but in the space of two days had three (albeit a bit dog eared) copies.

No Life of Pie though. We have had hundreds of them and always seem have one on the shelves.

No Canterbury Tales, no Treasure Island, only one of the Philip Pullman’s, no Orient Express, indeed not much at all.

That, dear reader, is what comes of having a good idea and having to learn patience.

Likewise, a friend contacted me looking for an old book on botany with lots of colour plates but in bad condition because her mother-in-law wanted to get such a book and have it professionally re-bound for her botany-mad grand-daughter.

Now we often get these. The illustrations a lovely but the plain board covers are not enticing.

They are often half falling apart. I must have handled hundreds of them.

Did we have one, no of course not.

Likewise again, I have dispensed with more Dickens than I have had hot dinners.

The success of the (great read) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and a re-writing of David Copperfield means that we have had a good dozen requests for the Dickens original.

Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations of course we have those but we are a Copperfield-free bookshop at the moment.