Now there is no other way of putting this, I am about to show you quite a lot of holiday snaps so if that thought does not make you slightly breathless with anticipation, now is your chance to leave the room.
In case you are still with me, these are not (well maybe just one or two,) snaps of sun-kissed landscapes and wine dark sea – more of what made me laugh in Athens museums.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a museum and like very much looking at history and great works of art, but sometimes there is, intentional or not, amusing stuff.
See what I mean?
Now this is calling out for a better caption writer than me……
My best guess is the unseen censor is being told in no uncertain terms that it is well past six pm and no, music does not do the trick.
Now just because something is old, it may not mean that it is automatically a very good example of the potter’s art.
It may well have been found during the archeological dig of a rich person’s house, but hey who hasn’t kept something with no intrinsic artistic value but some sentimental attachment.
I rest my case
This made me laugh out loud which is not de rigeur in museums but really…..
I do realise that she may well have been a woman of a certain physique, but come on. Lechery is one thing, coy peeping of a nipple is another, but to distort her to fit round the dimensions of a chair……
Now, these are the images of Mohammed’s footprints which he left on the rock when he went to heaven in 621 for one night to talk to the prophets and Allah and brought back messages for the Muslim faithful.
Apparently.
All I can say is that apart from the slightly odd second toe being longer than the big toe, they look remarkably well conditioned feet providing a good basis for supporting a body.
My pilates teacher would be delighted, I thought but then on a whim I looked up what it meant to have a second, longer toe and guess what……
‘A Morton’s toe otherwise called Morton’s foot or Greek foot or Royal toe is characterized by a longer second toe. This is because the first metatarsal, behind the big toe, is short compared to the second metatarsal, next to it. The longer second metatarsal puts the joint at the base of the second toe (the second metatarsophalangeal or MTP joint) further forward. It is a type of brachymetatarsia.’
And, ‘It’s widely believed that a longer second toe is associated with being ill tempered and it’s recommended to keep one’s emotions in check.’
Who knew?
Meanwhile, Livy, a Roman writing about the appearance of Bacchanalia arriving from Greece offered ‘a scandalized and extremely colourful account of the Bacchanalia, with frenzied rites, sexually violent initiations of both sexes, all ages and all social classes; he represents the cult as a murderous instrument of conspiracy against the state. Livy claims that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed. Livy believed the Bacchanalia scandal to be one of several indications of Rome’s inexorable moral decay. Modern scholars take a skeptical approach to Livy’s allegations. (Wikipedia)
I love that last sentence.
Anyway, Bacchus and his followers are all over art – shedding their grape vines and overflowing cups around the place – and often there are satyrs.
So here’s hoping these are depictions of should-know-better satyrs and not young children with inattentive parents.
So, if you are still with me, lets’ go to Warren Hastings.
He who went through an impeachment trial brought on by Edmund Burke and whose biography appeared in our shop.
Malleson’s Life of Warren Hastings bound by the Relfe Brothers with a presentation binding but no presentation certificate.
If you want a translation of that paragraph let me tell you a bit more.
Usually with a binding like this, you would usually get a printed presentation certificate pasted inside with teacher handwriting saying something like ‘to George Robertson for excellent marks in history.’
Now, the Refle Brothers are really well known quality book-binders but can you find their story/history on Google? – well actually no.
No Wikipedia page – and yes I do give Jimmy Wales some money for all the use I make of his site.
So, if you look you can find books for sale with Relfe bidding and they are pricey, but you can’t find out anything about them – or at least, I haven’t yet.
The page edges are marbled and I have flicked them to see if you do that a picture appears. If that was the case we would have a while lot more money to look forward to.
So next time you see a book in a charity shop with marbled edges, just give them a flick and happily pay the money they are asking.
Now, you often get good bindings on really boring books and I am not sure that the boy ( usually) who got it was terribly excited about reading it.
Indeed the copy we have looks pretty much unread….
But see the hand-tooled gilt and the spine bands and the original marbled insides. Nice, very nice.
Now back to Warren Hastings.
So Edmund Burke took two days to read the charges in Hastings’ impeachment. Mainly they were related to embezzlement, extortion and coercion.
The House of Commons sat for 148 days over seven years to hear this case.
In 1795 the House of Lords acquitted him and the East India Company, for whom Hastings worked, gave him a pension of £4,000 per year backdated to when he arrived back in England.
Hastings said the legal fees had pretty much bankrupted him but then he had lived in ‘considerable style’ in his London house throughout the trial……
And in 1788 he bought an estate in Gloucestershire for £54,000 had the house remodelled classical and Indian decoration, and gardens landscaped, and re-built its Norman church……not that living on lentils and no heating then. ( See also Rushi Sunak, again.)
Meanwhile, the East India Company was not just about trading.
Originally chartered as the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies”,the company rose to account for half of the world’s trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium.
The company also ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India. (Wikipedia)
(Should you need to know more see my Best Beloved’s one-day-to-be-published history of Europe book.)
The EIC was either the beginnings of the glorious British Empire on which the sun never set, or the rapacious company implying all sorts of greedy, coercive, pseudo-rulers who imposed, stole, acted with impunity and had little interest in recognising they were not in charge – and indeed they became in charge.
I leave you to decide.
According to a site called History Reclaimed, ‘The impeachment of Warren Hastings was an act of imperial soul-searching unparalleled in history. Although Hastings was eventually acquitted, his trial was a warning to all future imperial proconsuls that they too could be called to account by the British Parliament.
He was the first British Governor-General who launched India’s cultural renaissance way back in the 1780s. Of all Britain’s imperial proconsuls, Warren Hastings was undoubtedly the most curious and learned about Indian culture and famously declared: “I love India a little more than my own country”.
He became fluent in Bengali and had a good working knowledge of Urdu and Persian, the languages of the Mughal elite. One of his most enlightened acts as Governor-General was to promote the founding of the Calcutta Asiatic Society in 1784.’
And, according to Wikipedia, ‘He and Robert Clive are credited with laying the foundation of the British Empire in India.
Getting a bit of an idea where Malleson is coming from.
Malleson was certainly on his side – a hagiography I would suggest but then with a Relfe binding, someone is going to buy this book because they have judged it by its cover.
This is about a book from 1796 which has arrived in Oxfam Petersfield in 2022.
And about a coincidence.
Be warned, there is a lot of this – I got a mild dose of Covid so was at home with time….
But at least this time there are some pictures.
Ignorance of the provenance of book is the lot of a charity bookshop. Indeed, I am not even clear which of our volunteers, put it aside for me to look at.
Anyway, we have it, and what an interesting book it is. (Value, you Antiques Roadshow aficionados, will come later.)
So this is a bound volume of three letters by Edmund Burke and for those of you who think who? Here is some info – actually, quite a lot of info.
‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’
And:
‘Nobody made a greater mistake than he would did nothing because he could do only a little.’
Obviously, he was no feminist, but apparently he was anti-slavery.
He was also, depending on who you read, a founder of Conservatism and/or ‘a wet and a Eurosceptic’ according to the Beaconsfield Historical Society.
He wanted to be the Earl Of Beaconsfield and George III wanted him to be, but Burke’s son died so he couldn’t have a peerage. Life peers were only introduced in 1958 so if you didn’t have a male line to take it on, you didn’t get it.
What he did get was a handsome pension which was criticised by the Earls of Bedford and Lauderdale hence this:
His argument was that at least he had earned his pension by unstinting public service whereas the earls got their money by inheritance alone.
‘I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked and dandled into a Legislator’
And he wrote in one of our letters, ‘Loose libels ought to be passed by silence and contempt.’
Meanwhile in a 1771 letter to the Duke of Richmond, Burke wrote that ‘persons in your station of life ought to have long views. You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as I am … we are but annual plants that perish with our season and leave no sort of trace behind.’
Oh yes, he had a good turn of phrase.
And according to Martin Greenberg, who also has a good turn of phrase:
In Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), Burke replied with a crushing force to two whippersnapper peers, obscenely rich enthusiasts of the philosophes and the French Revolution, who had attacked him for accepting a pension from the crown. He set his lifetime of accomplishments against the nothing of their juvenile efforts, his defense of their inherited rank and acres against their coquetting with a power whose universal ambition, if it were able to reach across the water, would have swept away all that they were and owned with a grin. Burke’s prose–sober-paced, weighty, powerful to the point of being overbearing–has always close behind its argumentation a reserve of poetic energy which now gleams, now flashes, and now, as in this letter, explodes in a fireworks of dazzling metaphors, a storm of epical-satirical language that tosses around the duke and earl, great galleons of the nobility, like little cockboats. ‘
Now I am not directly making any comparisons with current British politics but if you want to, be my guest.
Our book was published in 1796, the year before Burke died.
Other things that were happening in 1796 include:
Jane Austen starts writing Pride and Prejudice,
George Washington gave his farewell address warning against partisan politics ( that worked then),
The British government began work on a 40 acre site at Norman Cross near Peterborough to become the world’s first prisoner of war camp,( who knew, and might need some more investigation)
At Christmas 1796, the French Navy nearly landed an army of 15,000 troops at Bantry Bay in Ireland.
And Napoleon was appointed head of the French Army in Italy which was to have some significant ramifications….
Hence:
Breathe easier, I am not going to give you a history of the Napoleonic Wars (though my Best Beloved can if you are interested.)
Burke wasn’t a fan of the French Revolution on the grounds because of its ‘origins and the class of people who were the driving force behind the Revolution’.
Basically, he didn’t believe that the French urban working class, or the peasantry, could be trusted with legislative or political powers.
He had the view that only the ‘educated’ could be reliably left to run any country.
So, you can get the text of these letters online and you can buy them in the original but very rarely, infact, very, very rarely can you buy one from 1796 printed on such good quality paper – and in an original binding. Most of them have lost their binding or were never bound at all – just get them out there, the printers must have said.
The paper is impressive. Very little foxing ( that’s the brown spots on the pages of old books) and it feels strong and thick and well cut, and well bound – impressive for such an old book.
We looked for a paper watermark but there wasn’t one. And I found out that this ‘book’ went into 11 editions in 1796. That is a lot of editions, and though the print run would have been the kind of print run were are used to, that is a lot of books.
And there are five raised gilt bands with gilt titling on the spine and gilt banding on the front and back boards.
Interestingly, at the bottom of each page there is the first word, or part of the word, of the next page. I have not seen this before, but maybe that is my ignorance.
It is also justified which means that the left and right margins are the same – and means that words are sometime broken up, or spaces are stretched to make the text fit the margins.
(That can make reading hard on the eye because different spacing seems disjointed. Our book, I have to say had a very good typesetter because it is easy to read.)
Is it about making sure the pages are in the right order? Possibly, but they are numbered.
Well, now you know a bit about how books are described online…..
And all that has been taught to me by someone who knows amore about books than I will ever do and who is the man who comes in ( when called up) and tells me what to look at, what to reasearch, what to learn…. and teaches me to expand what I know from the back of a postage stamp’s worth to, oh maybe a small postcard.
Waiting for the valuation? Well because it is bound and in great condition we are hoping for £275.
Maybe it will be sold asap or maybe it will take some time and be less than that – that’s the way it works.
Now, if you have got to the end of this and still have a memory of a mention of a coincidence….
So, Burke got his pension (I gather £2,500) in no small part for his work as Chairman of the Commons Select Committee on East India Company Affairs.
And he impeached Warren Hastings.
So when I went into the box of books that have been put aside for me to look at, under the Burke letters I found a handsome book – a biography of Warren Hastings….
I have no idea whether they were donated together or this is one of those coincidences that happen in the life of a bookshop when no providence can be found.
More of that next time.
And, we have another book from 1796, The History of America – perhaps more on that too.
Well, there is a limited readership for this, I’m sure. If it is any temptation at all, there are some simple supper recipes involved – mind you only if you like beans, and indeed mushrooms and are not bothered about having food photos because there are none.
And, by the way, you are not wanting exact measurements and timings etc.
Hope I am not putting you off too much………
Otherwise, it will be back to Oxfam books next time.
So, I am a big fan of beans (and lentils) which apparently turns out to be a good thing as they are very good for you – and are cheap.
And, I am one of the very lucky people who doesn’t need to count the pennies.
( Me, and the Chancellor Rishi Sunak apparently. At least I am not making other people pay more than they can afford with no help from the Government whilst ensuring my multi-million pound lifestyle is protected. And has no idea that some families cannot afford for everyone to eat different breads…… Just saying.)
And, having listened to the BBC Food Programme ( an excellent listen) on beans I had a bit of a conversion. I had always bought tinned beans, now ( because I can afford it), I buy beans in a jar.
The taste is indeed much better and a whole lot easier than buying the dried beans, soaking them and cooking for quite a long time – before you even get to a sauce.
Mind you, I can see that coming on.
There are still some tins in the store cupboard and they will have to be used. And they’re OK, we’ve been eating them for years.
Meanwhile, I am stuck at home with a mild case of Covid and seem to spend my time doing some book research (see next blog) and, of course, cooking.
I asked my neighbour to add a couple of things to her food delivery order and one of those were some mushrooms.
Not the white button ones, though I can find ways of using them, but the large field ones – meaty without being meat – and very useful in the kitchen.
A while ago, I had some and made for us and the neighbours, mushrooms with tarragon and sherry. (Mmm you say ?- well hold on and I will tell you how to make them.)
I am of the view that it is very hard indeed to overcook a mushroom but recipes are always suggesting you can cook them in a matter of a few minutes.
They are wrong. A bold statement I know, and one I have made before only to get messages which are the equivalent of a sharp intake of unbelieving breath.
But trust me. Don’t assume a mushroom meal is a quick meal. ( Perhaps a stir fry, I will concede, but really that is it. Not a step beyond.)
Anyway, my neighbour has a tendency to press the order button generously and now I find that I have a lot of mushrooms arriving this afternoon.
Part of the reason is the sherry and tarragon mushrooms I made for her and she liked quite a lot – so she added the big mushroom order.
So, here is what I did, – stuff:
Some nice mushrooms – remember mushrooms cook down to nothing (not quite the dramatic diminishing of fresh spinach when it is wilted, but not far off.) So, one container of supermarket mushrooms will feed two (ish).
Some chopped onion. I use half a small one for two of us.
Dried or fresh tarragon – to taste. Now fresh is lighter than dried, so up the quantity for fresh and be careful of the dried.
Garlic. Take a clove or two and if you want a stronger garlic flavour then chop it up. If you want a milder flavour crush them but keep them in one piece and fish them out before you serve it.
Some stock.
Dry sherry.
Chop the mushrooms to the size you want ( remembering they will shrink.) With the field mushrooms I do slices. Clearly, and you are not going to need this advice, the finer the slices, the quicker they cook.
Fry gently in a good amount of oil. Don’t stint but you are not deep-frying here. Don’t warm the pan and oil first, just put them all in.
Be prepared to wait and stir and check your emails, and stir……
Once they have got a good start in cooking, move to some hotter heat and add a lump of butter so that they brown a bit at the edges. It is worth it.
Once that happens go back to middling heat and add onions, once they have gone translucent, add the garlic.
Then some sherry – a generous slosh and you can always add more. I use some stock made from Marigold Bouillion.
So we are planning on mushrooms in a sauce so not too much so that they are swimming lengths in too much liquid, but not so little that you can’t tell they are in a sauce.
And some tarragon – if you are using fresh, save some back and chop very finely to scatter over the top of your finished mushrooms.
(This is not MasterChef so we are not talking amazing presentation just a little dash of poshness.)
Dried, I’d say a dessert spoonful, but we really like tarragon.
Cook, taste, and keep going until you are happy.
And again, you can always add more liquid(s) but it is hard to take it away so potter along adding as you fancy.
Meanwhile, back to the beans.
So, I had some frozen cauliflower and some (in a jar) butter beans.
Cook the cauliflower as per instructions or cook from fresh. Add some beans and whilst still hot, add some butter and finely chopped chives ( because I had them) and use a hand blender to make a puree or mash. ( Puree is best, I would suggest.)
Serve this under the mushrooms, and you have a very nice supper. As attested to by the neighbour and my Best Beloved.
Given that we have a shed load of mushrooms arriving that will be on the menu in the next few days.
And just before I go, a few more ideas because, as you can tell, I have not had much else to do whilst the plague keeps me at home….
Do the mushrooms as above but cook to be much drier and without the sherry and add in some chopped bacon/ham or not, if you don’t want meat.
Cook some pappardelle or any other long pasta you have.
Just before pasta is ready, add a large spoonful/ladle full of pasta cooking liquid and a few minutes later some creme fraiche to make a creamy consistency.
And, if you have any leftover puree/mash….
Make a sauce with (in my case) tarragon and parsley.
Chop some onion, fry as per above and add herbs and a good slosh of white wine and some stock.
This time you are looking for more liquid.
When pretty much cooked add in a spoonful at a time of the left over puree to thicken the sauce and service with roast chicken thighs and some purple sprouting. Sauté potatoes if you are in the mood.
Sauté potatoes = Par boil potatoes and fry in oil until crispy on the outside and soft in the middle.
So finally an update on the maps – yes plural – but be warned there is a wince coming on. And a long read so, as ever, brace yourself.
Just a quick re-cap.
In our unearthing of stuff the now-resigned manager had left stuffed under, in and around the behind-the-scenes parts of our shop, we found a lovely old map of Windsor and the 25 miles around.
We were very excited about this map and why not, it is a lovely old thing.
Anyway, as part of the shop’s lucky hinterland, I have been in touch with a man who has considerable expertise himself but as well as that, has his own hinterland of experts who can tell us what we have.
(We are lucky to have him and the occasional chat about what he has been collecting, things found in junk and charity shops, and what I have brought to him – are much appreciated.)
Brace yourselves, it is not always good news.
So, if you came across a map from the 1700s, printed and then hand-coloured with the local boundaries and the size of a smallish kitchen table, you might think you were on to a good thing.
But, apparently it was worth no more than £200. Our hinterland expert found someone in his hinterland and that man knew what he was talking about.
I thought a conversation with a local auctioneer might have be coming on, but decided to list it on Oxfam online first, just to see…
Meanwhile, more unearthing found us this.
Also from the 1700s but, according to our new and excellent expert, re-backed onto so later canvas.
Now a map of the Loire is unlikely to sell in the shop. We have relatively few customers who own a second home in the area.
I will list it on Oxfam online and see what happens.
Are you ready for the wince?
OK, so the lovely, hand coloured, printed as part of George III’s demand for accurate mileage between turnpikes, showing all sorts of interesting things including ” remarkable hills” Windsor map:
I did list it on Oxfam Online for £200.
And Oxfam decided to have (another) sale. Everything listed for more than three months got reduced. 50% and then 70% and so our beautiful map went to someone for just £75.
I was gutted.
Now I should have moved it out of the listings so that the sale would pass it by and that was something I failed to do – I would also have had a lot of books too to move – books don’t sell like clothes.
(Somehow, I thought that an old map, one as lovely as our’s would be exempt from the sale algorithm but that was me being distracted and not getting to check the comms about when the sale was sorted.
There were the 14 questions other volunteers had when I started the day, and the 20 things on my list of what to do that day, and the fact we needed milk for tea and coffee that I was making for us, so I went to get it, how to get an order for stationery when I don’t have a password to get into the system because I am a volunteer and not staff, the chat someone wants about the next few window displays, emptying the indoor bins and calling Biffa again about why they haven’t emptied the outside bins, someone texting me to say they can’t make their shift, who is going to cover Saturday afternoon……….. Excuses I know, but sometimes the urgent take over from the the important.)
Many books need to sit there quietly waiting for the collector of tractor books, or old maps, or special bindings, or the small publisher from the 19th century or or or…..
Of course, maybe we would never had sold it for £200 and yes, of course £75 all adds to Oxfam’s ability to help people for whom £75 is a vast amount.
I do know that, but I still think we might have got more.
Finally, on maps we have a map of Hampshire – yes Petersfield is in Hampshire – from 1821.
So, our expert got his experts to give us a valuation, and it is not much.
Think £30.
But, I am on a roll to recover from the Windsor map and I think there might be someone walking past the shop who might be willing to pay £75 for such a lovely thing.
We will try it and see.
But before I go, a bit about this map.
So, in 1821, Bournemouth didn’t exist according to this map, but according to Wikipedia:
‘Before it was founded in 1810 by Lewis Tregonwell, the area was a deserted heathland occasionally visited by fishermen and smugglers. Initially marketed as a health resort, the town received a boost when it appeared in Augustus Granville‘s 1841 book, The Spas of England.[1] Bournemouth’s growth accelerated with the arrival of the railway, and it became a town in 1870.’
They are both interesting men – worth a bit of a look.
And West Sussex where I live looks a bit like ‘There be dragons country.’
I have to say, that the dragons round here these days probably drive 4×4 and have swingy blonde ponytails but can breathe quite a lot of fire if you don’t give them room on country lanes and immediately move your Citroen Picasso into the ditch. Just saying.
Hundreds by the way are administrative divisions –
The origin of the division of counties into hundreds is described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “exceedingly obscure”. It may once have referred to an area of 100 hides. (In the early Anglo-Saxon period a hide was the amount of land farmed by and required to support a peasant family, but by the eleventh century in many areas it supported four families.[1]) Alternatively the hundred may have been an area originally settled by one “hundred” men at arms, or the area liable to provide one “hundred” men under arms.[2] (Note that in earlier times the number term “hundred” can itself be unclear, meaning the “short” hundred (100) or in some contexts the long hundred of 120.) Wikipedia.
And why on earth would Odiham (pronounced Odiam, in case you are planning a visit) be the point from which all distances were measured?
Odiham is the home of the Royal Air Force Chinook heavy lift helicopter fleet and I can attest to that because they fly over us – apparently learning how to go up and over the Downs as practice for some hills elsewhere.
Maybe also taking senior military types to golf, who knows…
But I gather that Odiham was equidistance from Winchester and Windsor.
Now, Winchester has a long history of power and clergy.
I have never been to that village but what a great address that would be. ‘Yes, itchings plural and no, I don’t know what the problem was.’
It has been a while so I think I will gently witter about birds and Oxfam, to get back into the swing of things.
So, lots of photos coming up and a few tales attached. ( It turns out to be quite hard to pun in text..)
(Mind you once I get back into the flow, for those of you interested in old books, I have a corker.)
So, good illustrations, plates, wood engravings, photos, diagrams, unfolding maps still attached, can add a lot to the value of a book.
Sometimes though the book is in such bad condition, or worth so little, you (well, I ) start to think about taking out the pictures and framing them because they will be worth more.
Now, as I have said before I would not desecrate a book in good condition and worth more than a few quid by ripping out the illustrations – no, I wouldn’t – but sometimes it is tempting.
So, a long time ago we got a lovely book, falling apart and the illustrations were by the Detmold twins who went on to be famous artists but at this point were teenagers – yes indeed – and living near London Zoo and they painted after their frequent visits.
The Best Beloved took the plates/paintings/illustrations and framed them – and we sold them for a handsomely bigger profit than we would have made from the badly injured book.
And this week, I have something which I am handing over to the BB to take apart and frame the images.
We have had an exhibition catalogue donated and sometimes they are worth quite a bit. Not this one – say £3.99.
But, I think we will be able to sell framed images.
Now tell me that these are not saleable when they are framed – and I am thinking we have at least say six or seven and we can sell them for say £5.99 each.
(And by the way, that is why it is called a Secretary Bird – quills coming out of its head. You have to be of a certain age even to know what a quill is…)
There are a lot of ‘say’s’ in this plan but I am willing to give it a go and see where we get to.
If you are interested, I will let you know.
This next book is a big book with lovely illustrations so I expected it to be worth, say, £5.99 and for someone to buy it. Neither was true. It is worth, according to Abe Books, £0.77p plus postage….
And despite me putting it in the shop at various times, in various displays, it hasn’t sold.
But this is one, I am not willing to break up – yet.
So, next time you are in a second-hand book shop, have a flip through the books that might look all too boring on the outside and find yourself lost in the details of a great engraving or the colour burst and design of an image or a pull out map which will tell you how to get from A to B in Berlin just after the war, or find a pre-Beck underground map – appreciate the delight of art and design in a book.
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.
So, it has been a while so here is a quick dash through the last few weeks before we get back to maps, coins and support networks.
Yes, thank you, we did well in the bookshop over Christmas. Not astounding but certainly enough to keep our heads above water with a certain air of pride.
The manager has permanently gone and we are waiting (with bated breath) for a new one.
And now we are in the dull days of trying to make silk purses out of quite a lot of sows’ ears.
All our best stock was thrown at Christmas and so we are left with the rather tired and weary – though we still get a few delights.
It is not that we don’t get donations, it is just that popular though vegetarianism is, no one wants to buy a dog-eared cookery book from the 1990s – where is an Ottolenghi when you need several?
Courtesy of central Oxfam, we were allocated several boxes of unsold Spur’s merchandise. Yes, the football club Tottenham Hotspur.
Why anyone thought the Spurs baby grows and woolly hats and picture frames would sell in a bookshop in Petersfield is beyond me ( they didn’t).
But such is their faith that we have just taken delivery of another two large boxes….
And there was one cupboard left to clear – accessible once we got the manager’s keys back.
In it we found a full father Christmas outfit and decorations – not much use locked away until after the festive season.
And why the key to this was kept on the manager’s personal bunch of keys, well your guess is as good as mine.
There was a Hornby train set, a copy of the Petersfield post from 2009, lots of old Oxfam publicity material, a fine wood plane, another old map – yes indeed – two whisks and a mixing bowl, a used artist’s palette, a flat cap, marching compass, a stash of pendants, two silver napkin rings, a pair of new kitchen taps and a night vision monocular.
There was a time when I railed against the manager’s hoarding but now I am disappointed that we might be getting to the end of treasure hunting ( and selling.)
So, it has been a bit of a week in the bookshop, a bit of a week indeed.
There are a lot of meanwhiles in this blog, I am warning you dear reader, but there is an update on the green sofa if you have been reading assiduously……
Let’s start with classical music. Our volunteer who does classical music was infuriated last year when the cat took away his carefully curated shelf of Christmas gift CDs which he had been saving for some months.
These are not those – just in case you are a classical music afficiando
No consolation or advance warning, a refusal to clear any other shelves to make room, just the explanation that there needed to be room for Oxfam new goods – gifts and the like – and ‘anyway classical music never sells.’
Well, this year the mice promised that the classical music Christmas gifts’ shelf would be preserved.
On Thursday, I got a call from that volunteer to say £250 worth of those curated and saved CDs had sold to one customer.
Meanwhile, another volunteer who sells jewellery online for us took her ‘collection’ of bits and pieces (odd earrings, a cigarette case etc) to a local jeweller for scrap value, and was hoping for about £50.
She got £215.
We were on a roll.
Meanwhile, don’t say I didn’t warn you, the model railway needed to be put on the table.
The very nice model railway expert came in late on Monday afternoon – we are closed then but that gives us time to do the table, the window, generally tarting up the shop without customers getting in the way.
He and I spent a couple of hours pricing up and presenting model railway stuff on the table.
I was very grateful, and pleased and then later in the week, he texted me to say he had Covid.
So, that means I have been in house-isolation ( bulbs getting planted.)
Meanwhile, it has sold really well – another bonus for the week.
Meanwhile, we have started on the green sofa.
And I have plans for the next few weeks.
Next week will have a jacket, a pair of wellies, a book The Perfect Puppy, Jess’s spare bed, dog treats, a lead and collar – you get the idea – and a photo of Jess in her bad days….
Meanwhile, when sorting some books the other day, we found a book called The Husband’s Mistake. We thought we could have a shirt with a lipstick smear on it.
And then I found these.
(Now, in case you don’t know Hemingway and Gellhorn were married and he was just a bit unfaithful…)
Meanwhile, the 1777 map.
So, we have got good photos of it and they are now with someone who lives in our village and who has a specialist auction business.
And, they are going to someone in Sotheby’s and another auction house – and we will see. But for the time being, here are the proper photos……
Decent coffee from coffee shop over the road for me, Jim and Ian
One of the shop floor heater is broken so a call to Oxfam Property Services – always an answer machine.
Go downstairs mention this to Ian who says ‘no I switched it off’ – not at the usual switch but at the heater, with the aid of walking stick. (Yes it is high up.)
Leave another message cancelling Property Services.
Billiard cues: Ian discovered them, I have had no luck in finding out what they are worth so hand over to Ian who says he will approach local snooker club
Key: So, we needed to get a new key cut because we had to send a shop key to the new Oxfam contractor which will be taking away our unsaleable books and clothes.
(Why they couldn’t get the keys from the old contractor is a question indeed.)
There is a long story about getting that key cut, but suffice it to say with the help of a generously bearded man with two very nice bulldogs, we did, and sent it off.
Meanwhile the old contractor did a collection but left no plastic crates for us to put books in for the next collection – and there were a lot of books.
Call to them who say they haven’t left any because their contract is up at the end of this week. But today is Thursday and we have two collections a week – and the second one is on Friday.
They call back to say they will collect if we leave the books in any plastic crates, boxes, or bags for life. So, we do.
Call Oxfam and ask for more details and find out the new company are coming (surprisingly) during the night to collect. When?
Are we getting two collections a week?
Apparently the new company should have been in touch and done a shop visit. They haven’t.
Call them and am told the area manager for our area, Laura?Lauren? will call me back – she doesn’t.
Have to call my fellow ‘acting manager’ and tell her about this in case Laura?Lauren calls on Friday.
If not, will add to Monday’s list which includes – model railway display ( see previous blog); area manager’s leaving coffee; getting her flowers and making sure everyone has signed our certificate of thanks; picking up a volunteer because the buses from her village won’t deliver her in time for the leaving do; messaging a volunteer on universal credit to make sure he comes to the shop first so that one of us can walk over to aforementioned leaving do and make sure he doesn’t have to pay for his coffee; calculating and printing out a briefing on the week’s takings and Christmas lunch, hoovering because we are not open on a Monday etc etc.
Meanwhile, I have bought an open/closed sign for the shop because even though we are not open, we use Monday to re-do the table and window and re-stocking and clearing books donated on Saturday etc and lots of people rattle on the door assuming because there are people in the shop, we are open.
Ask Ian to put it up.
Make more coffee and tea.
Start to put together a box of books to use as front facers. That means books on stands which show the customer their front cover. They sell better than those just showing their spine. Look in any bookshop and you will see front-facers.
We are now using all those books which are in pristine condition and that we have been collecting since August.
Send a text thanking the volunteer who sorted out the Christmas-themed books and DVDs we have also been collecting into cookery, crafts, children’s, paperback fiction etc piles.
Put out front facers – including a very nice copy of Durer’s engravings on art shelves.
When I deliver his next coffee, Ian has replaced it with a Max Ernst book…..
Jim is pricing the large crate we have been amassing, since August, of stocking-filler books. Humour, little books, off-beat books.
They only sell this time of year. But, and it is a big but, they need to all be front-facing to sell and we have no spare space. Will need thinking about.
Jim and I pause so that I can show him the 1777 map we have found (see previous blog.)
We have been sent, as have many shops around the country apparently, three large boxes of Tottenham Hotspur ( a football club in case you were wondering) merchandise.
Mainly for children.
I am wondering just how many young or very young Spurs fans there are in Petersfield…
Sort them into bags because we need those big boxes for books we are sending off ( see above), and price them all.
Find some woolly hats which don’t shout Spurs so budge up some Oxfam Christmas crackers, and price them, and put them out.
Check emails and find out that two boxes of end of season clothes are waiting for us in the Joules shop down the road.
Need to organise collecting them, but Jim has just left and that will wait until Monday.
Sort some books and find Asterix and the actress – not really saleable in this day and age.
We have used my mother’s old Kenwood mixer – which I used a lot growing up but has been in our cellar for a while – as a prop in the cookery themed window.
Put it for sale on local facebook group and the person who bought it came in to collect it, and tell me her mum will be delighted – and quite a bit more chat – still it boosts Ian’s takings for the morning.
Spend a bit of time working out shift cover – one volunteer has a step-daughter who needs her broken shoulder operating on so the family needs to self-isolate, another has an impending knee operation which will count him out for say six weeks, another has a major operation coming up and we will need to cover for her, as well as making sure she has a nice ‘care package’ from us.
(On that, as she is a beekeeper I am thinking one of the components should be Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution which is about an aged Sherlock Holmes. It is lovely and not too long and has quite a bit about bees in it. He is a great writer and I would read a shopping list he wrote. So, I nip round to the not-second-hand bookshop and order a copy.)
Another volunteer, David, arrives. ( He has just had a tooth repaired and wanted some distraction from a numb mouth and several days of painkillers.)
He is a cameraman in ‘real life’ so I have asked him whether he will take a photo of our large and valuable map with a wide angled lens and from up a ladder.
Our antiquarian expert volunteer has said he is no expert on this, but the map should be worth say £750.
I am wondering about contacting a local auction house who have waived their charges before, to see if it might do better – you only need two rich people to want something, and with internet bids who knows……
David calls his friend who is interested in old maps who says send a photo to the man he knows in Sothebys and we will get a free valuation.
Arrange to come in next Wednesday ( when I was hoping for a day off) to do the photos.
Back to the green sofa. You may recall I wanted to use my garage-stored green sofa for tableaux.
Idea being that someone has just got up to answer the door, and everything is left as it would be on the sofa.
See a previous blog for more ideas on what we could do.
Anyway, have arranged for it to come to the shop on Sunday thanks to my dog-walking friend whose husband has a vehicle big enough to get it in.
Check notes left by another two volunteers on what they think is the tableaux we should start with.
They go for the throw, a packet of lemsip, a mug, a pair of slippers and a book.
The only book, the only book, it could be is Cold Comfort Farm ( not least as I have read that many, many times when I am feeling under the weather.)
Do we have a copy – of course not!
Nip to the second-hand bookshop and buy one from them.
Make a list of what I will need from home to make this work – cushions, hot water bottle, my old slippers etc.
On the way back, I nip into the butcher as we have eight people for lunch tomorrow……….
thereluctanthousewife 