I can feel you are getting a bit bored with Oxfam surprise donations, but I am going to chance my arm with just three more….. and there are more pictures than text, if that helps.

But even so, I do warn you,, I am cramming in, so it’s a long read.

Firstly, the humour and interest in alphabetising. Not a sentence you hear every day, I do know that.

This made me laugh and I had to turn to the entry on hair pencils…

Well, apparently they were paintbrushes made of hair, called pencils because they were so fine you could ‘draw’ an line and were used to fine gold leaf work.

(If you Google hair pencils today you get a lovely Wikipedia article on butterflies:

Males use hair-pencils in courtship behaviors with females. The pheromones they excrete serve as both aphrodisiacs and tranquilizers to females as well as repellents to conspecific males.)

Then we got this strange book — actually maybe one of the stars of the window display when we do one celebrating 200 years since the invention of the railway.

And finally, and I promise no more oddity blogs for a while.

It does again fall into the category of well, I would never have thought there would be a book about that …..

It is surprisingly detailed and specific and, for a small book, packs a punch of information. 

Who knew you needed seven pages on the ‘Practical Geometry’ on ship painting – and that being the first chapter indeed.

There is everything from painting Barbette guns, whatever they are, to how to hang wallpaper in cabins.

Pages 68 to 97 are entirely devoted to ‘Letter Writing’ with the instruction:

‘To be a good letter writer should be the ambition of every young painter. In the Service his skill in this respect is in constant demand, and, if facility with the pencil be acquired, very little leisure will be at his command.’

Mind you according to Chapter 13 and the 29 pages of it, very little seems to be a simple as having a pencil tucked behind your ear.

Given this detail, I was rather surprised to find 19 pages in the Miscellaneous chapter. 

Including:

And, on the last page a warning:

And just to circle back, as they say, here are some alphabetical amusements: