Nearly Rack and Ruin

November 8, 2017February 22, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

For one reason or another, I have been away from the Oxfam shop quite a lot in the last couple of months and reluctant though I am to use the phrase ‘rack and ruin’, there was evidence that things weren’t good when I got back.

If I should say that I found a Sopranos box set on the children’s DVD shelf, I might not need to say any more, but I will.

Marigold Hotel on the action movies shelf, for example.

We have a relatively new rule which says that no hardback book should be in the shop priced at less than 2.99 – but lots have (in my absence) been priced at £2.49 and OK it is only 50p but I am guessing that 50p could prove useful in feeding a Yemeni child.

As I have said before, we think of ourselves as a bookshop which happens to be a charity shop, not a charity shop which happens to sell a few books – and that means standards are kept high.

I am more ruthless than most of my fellow book sorters but in my defence, we get lots of comments from customers about how nice the shop is – and of course, we have a small preen.

So, I have spent my last few shifts getting it back in order. Pulling brown-paged books off the shelves, persuading a volunteer’s granddaughter to put all the children’s books in alphabetical order, assigning culling and re-stocking of the different categories to different volunteers and so on.

And yes, of course it looks better.

Anyway enough of a rant.

Here are a few good things.

One regular came in looking for a DVD of French Connection and I knew we didn’t have it and in fact I can’t remember ever seeing it.

So, I went on the net and found one for sale for 50p with no charge for postage. I bought it and sold it to him (there was French Connection II as well) for £4.99 and he was so delighted he came in to say so, several times.

A colleague came up with the idea of doing a shelf of books that would be good as secret santa presents or stocking fillers – she is new and enthusiastic and coming up with very good ideas.

So, we sent for recycling the shelf of ‘self-help and pregnancy care’ books mainly on the grounds that in the eight years I have worked there, I haven’t sold one of those.

And we relegated ‘sport’ on the grounds there are only so many copies of Alex Ferguson and Bradly Wiggins’ autobiographies a shop needs.

Now we have space to sell small humorous books which we never otherwise sell and we have quite a collection of those re-done Ladybird books which were so popular last year and rather to my surprise still seem to be around this year.

Along with Five Do Brexit and endless books on quotations from grumpy old people.

And, since the end of August, I have been putting aside books that are in such pristine state they could be given as a Christmas gift without the recipient ever knowing they are second hand.

We have teetering piles of crates of these books and all of them need up-pricing which is a technical term meaning you can charge more for them than usual because a) they are in great condition and b) it is Christmas spending.

The issue is, when to put them out.

If you go too early, you have nothing left for the last minute buyers but if you go too late, you might get left with them and they won’t sell in January.

If I had a memory, I would recall what we did last year, and when – but I don’t. This year I am going to make a note of what we have, what we do and how it goes down.

Of course I will write that down and put it somewhere safe and it won’t be seen again.

That is the way with our shop – there are things that can be unearthed and have been there, under a shelf, in the back of a cupboard which have been around longer than I have.

On the other hand, you can put something down for a moment and it has disappeared.

That happened with the Yemeni maps.

Some kind soul had donated a number of military maps of Yemen. I was not sure the would have great re-sale value in Petersfield – but kept them anyway.

One of our volunteers is an installation artist and she saw them and wanted to use them in some artwork.

( Yes, strange though this may sound, it is true.)

She rang into the shop when I was there and asked me if I knew what had happened to them.

I had left them in a box by the lift but of course they weren’t there and I spent a good hour looking for them.

It turned out the manager had found them, and hidden them, to keep them safe.

I gave both of them a stern talking to about leaving messages in the message book (which most people never read or use) so that I could have saved myself an hour.

Still it will be very interesting to see how she make an art installation in Petersfield’s square out of Yemeni maps.

Finally, you will be please to hear, in this list of Oxfam doings, I changed the table display this morning.

We always do something for Remembrance Day and usually the shop is knee deep in military history and copies of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but this year we aren’t.

I have scraped together enough books for the table and of course it only has to last until Saturday but as I left the shop, I explained to the volunteer on the till, to try and not sell to many of them too quickly.

Mamie Dickens Signed This Book

September 1, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There are few times in an Oxfam volunteer’s ‘career’ that you get a book which might be worth a few thousand pounds. But then again not many are signed by Dickens’ eldest daughter.

No, I didn’t find it at the bottom of a box – another volunteer did.

I take my hat off to him.

Not least because I have to admit that if it had come through my hands for sorting, I might have thrown it in a sack without looking inside.

But he put it one side and made me look at it.

It is ‘The Household Edition’ and over the years I have learned there were a lot of them printed and quite a few of them come into our shop – whereas, dear reader, not a lot of them sell.

But this one has this dedication:

Mary (Mamie) it turns out, helped run the new household when Dickens left his wife taking the children with him and set up home with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth and may, just may, have had an affair with her – or more likely gone on to have an affair with Ellen Ternan.

It wasn’t until after her father’s death that Mamie re-contacted her mother.

(Charles Dickens with Mamie and Kate, two of his daughters)

Georgina found living with Mamie difficult, complaining that she was drinking too much. In the late 1880s she persuaded Mamie to move to Manchester where she lived with a clergyman and his wife.

Georgina wrote, “Mr Hargreaves is a most unworthy person in every way – and it was always amazing to me that she could keep up this strong feeling and regard and affection for him to the very end of her life. Mrs Hargreaves has kept true and devoted in her attentions to Mamie during her long illness.”

(I am not sure what the definition of drinking too much was in Victorian times but I suspect Georgina would not approve of my plans for a large glass(es) of white tonight….)

Back to the book: I think the dedication is to Mary Wakeman but I have failed to find her and thus a connection to Mamie.

The dedication is after Charles Dickens’s death and by that time Mamie had gone to live with a Rev Hargreaves and his wife in Manchester which was in itself, or had occasioned, a ‘scandal’ according to Wikipedia.

Then she left Manchester, and retired to ‘the country’ which was in this case, Farnham Royal in Berkshire and is now, to you and me, an extension of Slough – and there she died.

So, I looked at this book and its dedication and I Googled and got nowhere with any search of a similar book and dedication.

When I called our antiquarian book expert, who was on his way to somewhere to do something, he said not to get my hopes up as he didn’t think it was going to set the Oxfam Petersfield Bookshop world alight.

But, and dear reader and this is not something I often say, I thought he was wrong.

He turned up in the shop today to say he was. ( That conversation made me miss Pilates which is not something a Sussex housewife should do.)

Anyway, in the meantime, I had contacted The Dickens Museum in London who said it would be a great book to add to their collection but they didn’t do valuations.

I would like to go to them and if it turns out to be worth £100 they can have it with our blessings and free postage and packing.

But if there are (probably Americans) willing to pay hundreds, even possibly thousands of pounds that is what we will do.

After all this is not, I understand, even in my excited state, a national treasure.

So, I have contacted someone in Bonhams who has helped us before – usually that involves politely telling me what I have is not worth their thinking about.

I have contacted Peter Harringtons, a posh bookseller in London and another posh bookseller called Sotherans, and the retiring board member of the Dickens’ Society at the University of Iowa.

I have emailed the Slough Observer on the basis that Mamie must be a local celeb and perhaps they know of a local historian who knows of her friend and has some more information.

(Do they believe I am an Oxfam volunteer or do they suspect that I am posing as one so they will be nice to me?)

So, now dear reader, I will leave you to try and find Mary Wakeman and who was she to Mamie Dickens, where was Mamie Dickens when she gave this book as a Christmas present, are there any other books out there signed by Mamie, and I will keep checking my emails to see if any of these experts are excited.

What I did on his holidays Part 2

August 10, 2017August 10, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

So, this is indeed Part 2 of what I did in the two weeks the best beloved was digging up (very small) pieces of roman history.

And it is a litany of failure I’m afraid – there are by contrast just a couple of things which I can recount with an iota of pride.

But then, that is so often, my life – the 80/20 rule.

(I am going to keep the glimmers of self satisfaction until later as by then I might well need to boost a very flagging sense of self worth.

And if you are one of those people who believe wholeheartedly in being so very positive about yourself, you might want to look away now.)

Firstly, there were the crab apples.

You can’t buy crab apples in the shops, not even at organic, local, grocers.

So, given that we have a crab apple tree I do feel obliged to harvest them and make crab apple jelly – as far as I know there are no other recipes for crab apples.

Anyway, for the first couple of years we were here, it was an autumnal delight, but then became an obligatory chore. ( It is the business of having to get the ‘mush’ to drain through muslim bags overnight and then boil up and etc etc etc…)

So, last year, I gathered them up, simmered them into a mush and put them in the freezer, thinking that I would make the jelly sometime when I was not so busy – later in the autumn.

Yes, indeed dear reader, that overnight dripping day never quite arrived and two large bags of mushed crab apples filled up a goodly part of the freezer until last week.

So, I got them out, defrosted them, hung them to drip and felt a small amount of satisfaction that I had not succumbed to binning them and getting on with the rest of my life.

The next morning – and I would like to remind you that this dripping involves muslim bags hanging from broom handles wedged between chairs all over the kitchen – there was about an inch of crab apple syrup.

Clearly, they do not take well to freezing for nearly a year.

Not enough to make a decent jar’s worth and I had, of course, steralized quite a lot of jars.

The mush went in the bin – which with the benefit of hindsight…..

At least I tried with the crab apples.

I like a pedometer, it makes me do my 10,000 steps. I am not interested in a Fitbit or similar, just want to know the steps.

The one I had got very, very wet at the outdoor event I did a couple of weeks ago and it really wasn’t up to the rain – so I ordered another one and it arrived. See below for how wet it was.

Can I get it – something really quite simple – set up to my stride. Well of course I could if my brother-in-law who is techy and usually does it on an occasional trip from York, hadn’t been inconsiderately on holiday in Greece.

I have shoved it and its instructions into the back of a notebook. But I have a plan to go into the nice techy boys in Carphone Warehouse in town and claim I have forgotten my glasses so can’t see the instructions and could they just help me, even though it is not a phone, but I am a customer…

So, this week, my oldest friends came down to stay the night and I invited local good friends for supper.

The garden had had some attention on Sunday but it really needed the grass cut to look anywhere near tidy.

The best beloved has always cut the grass. I dimly recall in the early days of our relationship thinking that this was something I should fight and that it was utterly ridiculous to assume men had to cut the grass.

Indeed, telling this to a friend who would not call herself a feminist as I do, she said, ‘I’d never let my husband cut the grass, he’s rubbish at it.’

For the first 45 years of my life, I cut the grass. But somehow, over the last seven years, that has slipped into being something the man does.

‘What!’ I hear you cry, ‘Did you not remind yourself of your feminism and bloody well cut the grass – for heaven’s sake it is hardly brain surgery. You just get the mower out and get on with it.”

But no, I asked my oldest friend if she would ask her husband – I was too embarrassed to ask him directly – if he would do it.

And he did. And it looks great and yes, of course, I am grateful and ashamed.

I have a plan to cut it next week and restore my sense of grass-cutting self – but will I ?

But then, if that was not enough, the old friend came in from cutting the grass and asked why did my Twitter account direct everyone to another Reluctant Housewife, who lives in America and writes about Walmart?

‘No idea, ‘ I said, and indeed I didn’t.

He is also a techy person so I asked him to investigate.

After a while he said, ‘ I don’t understand why this would happen.’ Then after some more time, he said, ‘ You listed The Relucant Housewife.’

I was never one for details….

So, to boost my flagging ego, I will point out that I was, meanwhile, making a nice meal.

Get some nice brisket. It is a slow cooking meat and brown it. Then roll it in fennel seed and dried oregano.

‘What,’ I again hear you cry, ‘they are not herbs for beef.’

Live with me on that, and indeed I added bay leaves. You could do more traditional beef herbs if you liked.

Put the brisket back in a casserole – mine is a Le Creuset given to me by my mother who first imported them when I went off to university and I have been using it ever since – and add the better part of a bottle of red wine and some decent bought beef stock.

Bring up to a simmer/near boil.

Leave to cook at a low oven for a long time – like five hours.

Meanwhile, slice up some really nice tomatoes. ( Actually some were from my garden thanks to good friends who suggested using a tin bath as a veg garden.)

Pulverise some anchovies, washed capers and black olives.

When the meat is cooked, and rested, put the sliced tomatoes on a large plate. Add anchovy stuff. Put slices of meat on top.

Oh, I should have said, cook some oven chips and have them ready.

I had also made a polenta and orange cake and served with marscapone… but hey you don’t want to hear about that.

And today, in Oxfam, I sorted out the DVDs.

Now I know that doesn’t sound much but it was – and I could bore you with how much that matters in terms of getting our new ‘ film’ volunteer underway …. and how different there before photo would have looked.

But this is already far too many words so I will leave that out of my list of things I am not ashamed of.

Bring Me Your Childrens’ Books

March 7, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

If, for you, a story of an amazing find in the Petersfield Oxfam bookshop is getting a bit ho-hum, you should look away now, and maybe put down your reading glasses and head off to do something more productive.

Because, we are on a bit of a roll. But to get to the exciting stuff will take a while.

For previous exciting finds, please see, yes, previous blogs. ( I am not going to repeat all that except to say, we are still with children’s books.)

So, if you willing to carry on….

Our very nice book expert came in for a whole afternoon on Monday and we decided to wade through all the books I couldn’t, or hadn’t, priced.

I don’t often get a whole afternoon of his time and so with some cups of tea, a bit of gossip, chat, and swapping notes, we got on with the job.

Yes, there were two lovely books dating from 1700, in French, by someone who was an early Enlightenment writer. When I say lovely, the binding was in bad nick but then you would be if you had been around since 1700 and you had valiantly protected the insides. (£85.)

But the point here, is that I need him to describe all the stuff which makes really old books saleable on the internet – and I take notes…..

Full, or half calf binding, buckram, AEG (in case you want to know All Edges Gilt), strained hinges, free endpapers, steel engravings, woodcuts, etc etc.

I am learning, but I need him to hold my hand as it were.

So, we did a few of those.

The plan was that he would dictate the description of old books, I would type furiously and they would be on the net in no time at all and we would clear the whole two shelves.

It was always an ambitious plan.

As I say, we did a few of those and then went looking for ‘tasty treats.’

Then we rootled out a book which we have looked at before and wondered about, several times and this time we said we would definitely get that sorted, and on the internet that afternoon – but we got distracted.

First up distraction was a book we had looked at before but never had time to really check out.

It is a small thing, dating from the early 1800s, and inside it has illustrations of ‘Nearly One Hundred Familiar Objects’ ( don’t you just think, ‘Oh go on then, make it the full 100?)’ And of course the ‘nearly one hundred’ objects of the early 1800s are different from ours.

There are bonnets and top hats for example, and each page has words with hyphens so that the child can learn how to say them.

After a bit of research we are going to put it on the internet for £225. This little book has lasted all these years and is a snapshot back in time and, believe me, it is a rare find.

But the real surprise was this book.

Now, I have to say that I am used to looking inside children’s books and I am looking for illustrations/images/drawings/woodcuts…

This book was, again, small and had no illustrations but it did, as you see, have a nice cover.

I would have easily put it in the box for £1.00 books except for the cover – and how wrong, dear reader, I would have been.

In my defence the book expert also thought it was not going to be that special and he has a lot more experience and expertise than I do.

So, we started checking it out on Bookfinder and Abe Books and we were, as they say, gobsmacked.

There was a version signed by the author to Rose La Touche – George apparently was the go-between for her and John Ruskin – at more than £4,000, and another similar to ours but not as good, at £450.

It turns out that George MacDonald was quite an influence – he influenced Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis for the Narnia books and JRR Tolkien among others. Look him up on Wikipedia – he looks like Rasputin but was a Scottish author, poet and christian minister.

I fear we got a bit carried away and we may have to reduce the price, but at the moment, it will go on the internet at £650.

Do I know who donated these books? Should I try and contact them and tell them that at the bottom of those bags or boxes they left with us after clearing out their parents’ house, are worth lots of money. ( Of course, I don’t know that they were clearing out their parents’ house but it is often the case.)

Well, I don’t know who there are and none of them were Gift Aided which would have allowed us to get their address – anyway would I have contacted them? I am not sure.

I like to think they would be delighted that the books had been discovered and not sold at £1.00, and the money will go to a good cause.

And on that note, just before I leave you…..

We had a lovely 12 panel map of The Thames from source to sea dated from about 1914.

We put it as a centrepiece in the window surrounded by books and maps – and on the table, a travel theme.

Alongside it was a sign describing it and the price of £100 and a gift aid label. In the Message Book under the counter was a note saying the map was £100.

One volunteer was asked if there was a deal to be done on it but she didn’t know whether there was, so said no.

Another volunteer was walking through the shop when someone asked to look at it. She reached it down, failing to notice the BIG notice showing the price and, later told me, the customer asked the price.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘ The rest are about £2.99, so let’s say that.’

Later, she saw the notice.

She rang the shop next day to apologise and she had been awake in the night realising what she had done.

These things happen, but I have to tell you, I felt sick. Does that customer know what she has got, or might it be re-donated one day…..

A Very Good Day

March 2, 2017 / aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

As you know, there are good and not so good days ‘working’ at the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield – and today was a good day.

I am going to save the best bits to last, so you are welcome to skip.

Volunteers are always a scarce resource but we have a few, valuable, new ones and they are making such a difference.

They make my life a whole lot easier because they do things I mean to do but just haven’t time and, of course, the more volunteers, the less the chance we have to shut the shop when someone goes on holiday, or is ill, or has a better offer for an afternoon.

Today one volunteer did a sterling job of putting in date order the five crates books of the Institute of Naval Architects from 1940 to 2004 and logging the missing volumes so I can list them on the internet. (Should you be interested, £200 and buyer collects.)

Another volunteer said she liked sorting things out so I asked her to sort out the jumble upstairs on two shelves of travel books, natural history books and transport books – Steam Railways Past and Present should not be in natural history…..

After that I walked her round the shop and explained what was what on each shelf.

Now, dear reader, you might think that the shelves would be like a supermarket – here is history/baking goods, here is academic/canned vegetables, here is crafts/cheese, but it is rarely that simple.

We have no control over what is donated and we cannot have empty shelves so we are always juggling shelf-fillers and categories.

(Who’d have thought we needed to fill two shelves with books on mathematics and maths puzzles – but that is what we did when the Christmas goods were over and removed.)

I was worried that she would be overwhelmed and put off but at the end of her afternoon, she said, ‘I feel as if I have only been here 5 minutes and it has been hours, and there is so much left to do, this is great.’

That’s what I like to hear – someone who has found what they like doing in the complex business of running a bookshop and is planning on putting more money on their car parking ticket next week so she has longer to sort things out.

So, now to the bits that added a good feeling to the day.

Readers with a good memory will recall that some time ago at the bottom of a box of rubbish books, I found a book called The Square Book of Animals – a children’s book with lovely illustrations and which sold on the internet for £450.

Well guess what, at the bottom of another box of books a few days ago, I found something called The Rabbit Book by Charles Pettafor, and again I thought this might be worth something.

(Children’s books of some age that are not wrecked, scrawled on, and in one piece are often worth a bit – just because they have survived relatively intact.)

I looked it up on Bookfinder and Abebooks but couldn’t find any for sale. I looked it up on Google and found it mentioned, but non for sale.

Now that makes it rare.

So I called our excellent book specialist and said I had a tasty treat for him – I don’t ask him to come in all the time, just when I have something(s) I can’t price.

Usually, he can find its price and, usually, I am disappointed, but I am learning from his tuition and this time I thought it was a good find.

He came in and we looked at it. ‘It is pre Beatrix Potter,’ he said, ‘It is about a rabbit and look at the illustrations. Could he have influenced her? Could this rabbit have sparked her?’

Not according to Google – he was not listed as an influence in her.

But still, we had a book that people were looking for. We had a book which we thought had a small print run. We had a book which was a children’s book from about or pre 1900 in great condition with lovely illustrations.

We decided to put it on the internet for £500. I will let you know if it sells for that.

And, finally.

Some time ago I found a small glass vase and I mean very small, on the shelf out the back and it was very light.

I happened to be meeting that very same book specialist and he is also an archeologist and a trustee of the local museum and so I asked him whether it might be old.

(I love the idea of old glass – how can it have survived? How lovely that it was blown by hand as it were…)

Last time I rang him, I asked whether it had got information on whether indeed it was indeed old and he said – he couldn’t find it.

‘What,’ I cried, “ I wanted to buy that!’

‘OK, I will bring you another Roman glass vase instead’ he said.

And he did – how amazing is that….?

I can’t tell you how delighted I am with this.

It turns out that the local museum has the original and if that turns out to be real rather than a good fake, I will buy that too.

A good day or what?

Bargain Hunting

February 26, 2017August 10, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There is little I like more than a mission and bargain hunting.

(When I lived in Paris, I would set myself small missions to give structure to otherwise very, very, very boring days. Whether it was seeing a particular picture in the Louvre or buying a wooden spoon from a kitchen shop several miles across the city…..)

Anyway, I was on a couple of missions to Chichester which, luckily, has two auction houses and some good charity shops.

I like auctions a lot.

I like the range of people there, I like the auctioneer’s savvy and the fact they maintain a straight face when a lot doesn’t even manage to get a £10 bid or goes for several thousands of pounds more than the estimate.

Infact one picture – an Indian one with an estimate of £200 went for £22,000. It made the seller very happy as he had picked it up in another auction a few years ago as part of a general lot and paid not very much for it – it is the internet viewing and bidding that has made the difference.

I like seeing the dealers in action and the sheer, nerve-wracking excitement of people bidding for the first time for something they really, really want.

Anyway, we need a replacement for the table in our spare room. The current table worked when the best beloved changed the spare room into a history-writing room, but now he has moved back into his old study, the large table is something that has to go.

So mission number one was a smaller table.

I had been to the Stride and Son auction rooms a week or so before to take the Victorian photo albums – oh please do keep up, all that was in a previous blog – and had had a mooch around the sale room which was gearing up for a sale and found a couple of tables which would work nicely in our spare room.

Each auction is run slightly different and this one had a quirk I hadn’t seen before.

For the first hour or so, everyone was in their back yard bidding for the ‘outside stuff’ which you couldn’t view until the day – so, dear bidder, be quick in your assessment and even quicker with your bidding.

Then everyone moved inside for the posh stuff.

I had seen a very nice Georgian round table in yew and fruitwood which was estimated at £100 to £150.

At the country auction I usually go to, the estimate is a bit optimistic so I pitched up prepared to pay £100 but rather hoping to get it for,say, £60.

After all you have to pay a buyer’s premium on top of the hammer price and that is about 20% – yes I know, quite a lot, but they have to make a living out of all this.

This auction turned out to be a better place to sell than buy. That table went for £220 (before buyer’s premium.)

That is, presumably, the difference between cosmopolitan Chichester (think Westeros, for those of us who know Game of Thrones ) and out in the country north of the Downs (Winterfell) auctions.

I like a bit of yew and fruitwood but I am not proud and there was another similar Georgian table but in mahogany which is nowhere near as popular – but of course this table dates from the 1700s.

It has survived from then and I could own it but, dear reader, ‘brown’ furniture is not in vogue so it goes for less than pine furniture. Can that be true? you ask, indeed it can.

Anyway the latter lot was a long way from the first lot so I went out to hunt around the shops on Mission Two.

I was looking for bits of a wedding outfit – not my wedding you understand – and I went into TK Maxx and found a nice pair of shoes that would do and/but they were £29.99.

I say and/but because my charity shopping personality says, ‘What? How much?’ and so I left them behind.

I then did a fingertip search of the charity shops and found a pair of shoes for £7.

Here they are:

Yes indeed Ferragamo designer shoes, and I paid £7.

Then I found a lovely vintage Jaegar silk scarf – might not work with wedding plans but hey who cares for £4.

And then I went back to the auction. It was still hours, and I really do mean hours away from my lot so I put a commission bid on it and set off home.

Recently I have signed up with the website Saleroom which allows you to bid live online but I wasn’t sure I would be back and sorted out with a bidding identity in time, so I left the commission bid.

I hate doing that because you have no control – if you have left a bid of say £30 then the auctioneer is probably not going to start the bidding at £10 but if you were sitting there and holding your nerve and not bidding too soon, you might get it for say £15.

Or you could be outbid in the room by £5 and if you were sitting there you might be reckless and bid another £5 and get it. But the auctioneer is limited to what you told him to bid – no leeway and no extra fivers.

When I got home, I got logged in and ‘watched’ the sale live and could indeed have bid via the wonders of the internet.

My lot was one of the last ones – everyone is tired, many have gone home – late lot is always a good bet.

I got it for £28.

So, this is a table that has ‘lived’ for more than 300 years, is handmade and with a good polish will look lovely.

Missions complete.

You can’t overcook a mushroom

February 21, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

It is a time of mysteries at the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield and that is not a sentence which often forms itself around the mundane life of our bookshop and what is more, they are nothing to do with books.

I will leave the most recent mystery to last, and start with the first.

( This is a long story, dear reader, I must warn you, so either get yourself a drink and settle down or decide you really must break off and go and clean out the fridge. I will quite understand.)

We have an art sale of books and pictures about twice a year and they are, by our standards, a big money spinner.

Most of the art we get is not, shall we say, of the highest calibre – amateur daubs, dreary and not very good Victorian prints of Bath, watercolours of geraniums in France, that sort of thing.

But now and then we get some good stuff.

(Three large oil paintings did a treat as centrepieces in the window and though they were not worth the £200 we originally thought, they did sell for £50 a piece.)

Then, by complete chance, a week before we were due to do our sale, the nice man closing down his art shop in a nearby town, brought us all he was left with. Including, a large image of Marilyn Monroe that he had paid some £300 for. (Whether we can get anything like that at auction – for that is where we will sell it, remains to be seen but, be assured,I will let you know what happens.)

I assume by now, if you are not clearing out the fridge, you are asking yourself what is, in the remotest sense, mysterious about all this – well, nothing.

But, as I was rifling through art donations, I came across this:

Now I am a sucker for any painting with snow in it and any Russian painting with snow in it gets my heart beating a little faster.

But I am not sure whether this is an amateur daub worth diddly-squat or the nice early piece by an up and coming Russian artist – and Russians are willing to pay quite a lot for their art these days.

I put out on Facebook the image of the cyrillic and what I presume is the translation on the back and asked for help – and indeed got it not least via the Polish friend of a French friend.

But no one has come back with any information about the artist.

It took it to a local auction house who said they weren’t sure either and the only way to tell whether it was a rare find or a piece of nice junk, was to put it in the auction and see what happened.

Oh, dear reader, my dilemma. I want that painting. But I also want Oxfam to get as much money as possible. So, what to do?

I brought it home and asked another auction house – where I happened to be, bidding for stuff but more of that in another blog – even if you have stayed with me this long, there are only so many diversions and sentences you can put up with.

They said they had an art expert and send over some picture of the painting and they would get her to have a look.

All excited I did that – but she is away for two weeks.

Then I Googled for longer and with more patience than is usual and found that there is a register of several thousand Russian artists but it costs money – remember this is Oxfam so we can’t go mad and short of crowd-funding the registration fee or getting my best-beloved to pay up on what might be a wild goose chase, that is not going to happen.

The Polish friend of my French friend suggested I got in contact with the union of Russian artists, and I did, and I have heard nothing.

In the village is someone who deals in East European art and in the ways of villages and I am thinking of contacting him and asking for help.

The second mystery is about three photograph albums which belonged to, we think, the son of the more famous father, Lord Raglan – in case you re racking your brains, the father sent off the boys in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

But you can get the full details of that story in a previous blog. All that remains is to see what they fetch at an April auction.

So, the final mystery.

I had been sorting and sacking a depressing amount of books on Monday and needed a rest.

So, I went upstairs and rooted around the Old and Interesting shelves to get them in some order.

It is my contention that in our shop you can put something down and it might well be there several years later but then again, if you need it be there two days later, it will have vanished.

It is also my belief that there are all kinds of hidden treasures to be unearthed if only you have the time to rootle behind and under shelves and desks and boxes.

Anyway, on this occasion, I found, on a windowsill and god knows how long they had been there, two postcard and picture albums with a handwritten slip in one which read, ‘My parents Eileen and William Shackleton holidays in Switzerland 1906 -1913.’

There were indeed images of Switzerland – but also, I have to say, Llandudno and other places.

I know that anything relating to Ernest Shackleton is priceless but were these people related.

My Googling has not yet been extensive enough to find out and right this minute I need to go and cook a nice risotto for the best beloved so I will ask any reader making it this far and who has any information, please let me know.

I am pretty sure that is a very long shot, but thank you anyway.

PS I had to leave off and go cook that risotto but I had left those mushrooms cooking and realised (too late) that you can over-cook a mushroom, so it will be a ham and pea risotto…..

Just a snapshot

February 1, 2017 / aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

A few months ago I discovered three photograph albums at the bottom of a box.

I am not sure why treasures are hidden at the bottom of boxes, but it is nearly always the case.

Anyway, these needed some researching – they were clearly old and of the aristocracy and were in what would have been very nice albums in the 1860s.

As is the way, I put them on a high up shelf (out of the way and not likely to get thrown away by mistake) ready to ‘have a go at’ when I had time.

I got them down once to show our antiquarian book expert who said, yes, they were interesting but neither of us had much time, so they went back up there and I forgot about them.

This week, he came into the shop for a few hours and rootling among the books I couldn’t value or didn’t know how to describe in the internet and needed him to look at, I found the photo albums.

There is something about old photos because of the effort needed to produce them – the subject sitting still for a long time, for a start.

I thought of the thousands of photos I have on my laptop – taken instantly, in colour, many taken on my phone and most of which don’t have much in the way of artistic merit – then again these albums are full of rather unattractive, stern looking, rich Victorians….

Neither of us are photographic experts so we did what anyone would do, and set about Google.

We worked out that at least one of the albums had been put together by Lord Raglan and we think he was the son of the more famous father. ( Papa had sent off the Charge of the Light Brigade.)

We also discovered there had been a relatively recent battle over the inheritance of the title, and all it entailed, between two nephews of the childless 5th Lord Raglan – you can read about this in an entertaining sidetrack https://www.ft.com/content/5b3fa2e2-6194-11e3-916e-00144feabdc0.

Anyway, whilst reading around this court battle we found the name Jonathan Spencer and he was the lawyer for the British nephew ( the one who thought he was going to inherit, only to find the 5th Lord had decided his American nephew would get it all.)

Rootling around, we came up with contact details for Jonathan Spencer and decided to give him a call to see if the family would be interested in having the photos back – for a small consideration of course.

I was rather surprised that such an eminent lawyer would answer his own phone but not half as surprised as Dorset solicitor Jonathan Spencer was – he had never heard of the Raglan Row ( as we are now calling it,) leave alone been the lawyer involved.

So, back to Google to find another route.

By this time, I had taken the albums home to spend an evening seeing what I could find out.

I discovered that some of the photos were taken by notable photographers and the ones of Queen Vic and Albert were taken by someone who was appointed to do that for her.

Others were prominent photographers of the well-to-do.

In case you are interested: Camille Silvy, and the National Portrait Gallery has stuff of his – that made my heart beat a little faster but for all I know, they have millions of his old photos, worth not very much.

(He went back to France thinking he had been poisoned by the chemicals used for developing but, according to Wikipedia, he probably had manic depression and indeed his self-portrait does not show a jolly chap.)

Then there are John Mayall, Negretti & Zambra and W & D Downey – the Downeys were brothers from Newcastle who made good in London.

But I still don’t know if we are sitting on a small goldmine of early photography or whether they are not interesting to anyone at all.

Through a friend, I have made contact with the book department at Bonhams and have sent off an email, with attached images.

Through Facebook, I have made contact with a friend of a friend and likewise sent off images.

All I can do now is wait, and in the meantime it is back to sorting paperback fiction.

There are times when I wonder

September 26, 2016 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There are times when I get fed up with Oxfam. Well, actually it is nothing to do with Oxfam, just the bookshop.

Today I put out a lovely collection of textile art books and thought that instead of working five or six shifts this week, I could use that time to reinvent myself as a textile craftsperson.

Instead of coming back from two weeks’ holiday and finding the place so full of books that you could hardly move – most of which dear reader, as you might know by now, went in a sack – I could do something delightfully creative and in my own time.

But it is not going to happen.

Firstly, I need structure and left to my own devices, I would fiddle about with time week after week, after week, until months had gone by and I would have nothing to show for it.

Secondly, I need contact with people and am rubbish at doing stuff on my own – I am not sure how many collective textile art beginners groups there are in Petersfield, but I am guessing not that many.

And I like my fellow volunteers and enjoy their company. The dog is great and the Best Beloved is great too, but they are not as good at being bossed around and they have their own stuff to do all day – sleep and write history, though the dog’s book is coming along very slowly she says.

Thirdly, I would really miss the books.

For all the sacks there are gems. For all the depressing piles of browned Dick Francis collections, collections of guides to the stately homes of England, all creased, and who wants to buy a second hand guide to Windsor Castle? – there is a delight.

At the moment, I have a collection of old books on nature – ‘Nature for Bright Boys’ for example. Dull boys presumably should go off and make model aircraft or something.

And there are books with bizzare subjects. Who would think you could make your own horse equipment or why you would want to do that. Does stacking wood the Norwegian way differ from the way you would stack it in Deepest Sussex – too late to find out as it sold ten minutes after I put it out.

A book on the children of the ‘Persian’ royal family – battered but worth a couple of hundred quid.

Books, with just really good titles.

Old knitting books with cover pictures of extremely glum-looking children – mind you considering what they are wearing, I am sympathetic.

So, I will – and dear reader you can no doubt see my martyred air – carry on juggling shifts and sacking books and making plans which I never get to carry out because there are too many books to sack and sort and price.

But in between all that, I will build a collection of old medical books, books which are so pristine we can sell them at Christmas as a gift that the receiver will never know is a second-hand book.

I will look up all the old annuals we have been given – some are worth something but most aren’t – and put them out with the Tintin books which sell like hot cakes.

I will build a collection of princess books around the wrought iron frog wearing a small crown – he sold so there must be a princess somewhere in Petersfield who is an optimist.

I will polish my halo and carry on, and secretly wonder if I would ever have made a textile artist.

The Visit

August 14, 2016August 3, 2016 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

We were told that our Oxfam shop was to be inspected by our area manager.

First off, I must say that she is a good woman who sees us (thankfully) as a very well-run shop and so, sensibly but a little exhaustingly, devotes her energies largely to shops that are having problems.

Occasionally she will turn up in Petersfield just to visit a shop that is fine, thank you very much, drink tea and just have a rest from sorting out problem stuff.

But anyway the rules are that we should, on a regular basis, cull books that don’t sell and ideally send them on to another shop for another chance.

Sadly, the last but one shop we were designated to send them on to closed. Then it was Bognor’s turn, but at risk of plagiarising a King George V, Bognor is buggered. Or at least it is not taking our culled books any more.

Be warned dear reader, this is just the beginning of me explaining how we price books and run the shop so you can pick up a copy of Bedside Algebra (yes there is such a book – and we have it in stock) if you want something more riveting.

Anyway, the rules are that paperback novels should be culled every three weeks.

My great colleague Stella does that – and makes sure they are all in proper alphabetical order. And I mean proper order.

But that relies on having the stock to do it – and for the first time since I have been there, we are short on paperback fiction.

(So, by the way, if you live near Petersfield and have a lot of good quality paperbacks please bring them to us.)

The same three weeks lifespan, apparently, should be true of non-fiction, but really, give over. We just don’t have the stock.

But our area manager was due to visit us to make sure that everything was up to date, so we needed to make it easy for her to sign us off as being a shop that ‘does the right thing.’

At this point I should explain how this works:

Every book that comes into the shop has to be sorted – will it live or will it be put in a re-cycling sack? – what category should it be assigned to, will it fit onto the appropriate shelf upstairs before being brought down into the shop.

We have pricing guns that print the price and category. They are a bit old, hard to work and it took the manager being off ill for some time before I finally mastered how to re-load them with new rolls of labels.

It turns out that if you throw them across the room, they break easily and are a surprisingly expensive £50 to replace. It wasn’t me, but it could have been.

(Should you need to know, I can tell you each and every book category by heart. So, category 15 is for old and interesting and category 5 is hobbies and category 8 is travel – see what I mean.)

And then the week is put on in pencil. And that’s so that you can pick a book, any book, of a shelf and know how long it has been sitting there.

In an ideal world, you would have a culling regime and a small army of enthusiastic volunteers would take books off the shelf that had been there for too long (more than three weeks), and replace them with newly donated books, all checked, priced and sitting neatly on a shelf upstairs.

We don’t live in that world.

So, the point about putting the week in pencil is that if we want to leave a book to get another (rather more lengthy) chance, we can rub out the week and put another (later) week on it. (Should you be in the slightest interested we are currently on week 18.)

Because we are a) short of stock and b) short of people who do systematic culling, I decided to get every book in the shop re-labelled as week 16 – the week the area manager was due to visit.

I do realise that this is cheating. I do realise that the area manager is not stupid and she will know what is what. But also, I know that the rules don’t quite work if you end up with empty shelves. (I also know that our shop manager has to live by the rules so there are things it is better he doesn’t actively know about.)

Dragooning fellow volunteers into this plan, I had many a person armed with a rubber and a pencil to re-week for England.

Whoever had been putting the weeks on with a biro was soundly cursed – even though they may well have claimed that if culling was done properly, it wouldn’t need to be in pencil….. Yeah, whatever.

The shop looked really good. The day before the area manager was due , I got an extra shift out of one of my colleagues and, building on two weeks of work, we changed every front-facing book, re-did some books in the window (but knowing they were likely to sell quickly didn’t put them out until 4.30 so that they would be there when she arrived the following morning.)

I was on the till, he was upstairs rapidly clearing boxes of books – pricing them, tidying shelves, emptying bins, making sure we had chocolate biscuits – anything and everything to make the shop look Sunday Best.

Of course, dear reader, you will have guessed that an emergency came up and the area manager didn’t come.

I comfort myself with the notion that we are never one of her emergencies and the shop is now ready for us to manage the culling properly.

We now can go round systematically and cull based on the fact that week zero (or week 16) has been established – and more to the point, the only one of our volunteers who did proper culling in moving to Sheffield.

Of course, all of that relies on the good people of Petersfield having a clear out of books.

thereluctanthousewife

life marooned in deepest sussex

Oxfam