Books

Catch Up

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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.)

Mind you we do have a lot of cupboard space.

Oxfam Needs a Green Sofa

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I have an Oxfam plan  – but it may well not work out in practice so I am putting it out to you to imagine – because there will be only one photo. 

(Of course if it works, there will be lots more photos in another blog, or several….)

Assiduous reader, if you are still with me, you may well know that we have a window and table display to sort out.

The window lasts for two weeks but the table needs changing every week – you need books and extra supplies to keep them both filled when pesky customers start buying your display.

But this idea needs only one, or two, or a few books.

So, you walk into the shop and see a slightly battered old green Edwardian sofa.

It would be cleaner than it is now – but still not a pristine sofa.

Now, every week you would see a tableau.

Someone has just got up to make a cup of tea, go to the loo, answer the door, or whatever.

Their ‘life’ is left behind on the the sofa with room for a customer(s) to sit down if they need to.

( Our still-away cat has always refused to have sitting opportunities in the shop – one of the reasons why this might not work  –  but we have a demographic which appreciates the chance to rest while looking at books.)

You need to know that all the books mentioned are open and laid down – the sofa sitter has just put them down when called away.

So, back to your view of the sofa. These area few of the tableaus you might see.

You see some knitting, a cardigan and a pile of 1950s magazines.

There is a dog lead, a winter jacket, a bag of dog treats and a book on dog training.

Some wrapped Christmas presents, some sellotape, some Christmas cards and ’Twas The Night Before Christmas book or Its A Wonderful Life DVD.

And while I am on the festive theme, a dinner jacket and women’s sparkly bolero thrown over the back of the sofa, with her shoes discarded too. You could have a book on hangover cures…

A basket of clothes needing ironing, an iron (we still have four for those of you who have been reading for a while) and a copy of 50 Shades of Grey or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Female Eunuch.

A pair of binoculars, muddy boots on a newspaper sheet, a camera, a notebook and a book on bird-watching.

An Oxfam throw, a mug, packet of lemsip, a hot water bottle and a copy of Cold Comfort Farm.

Another Oxfam throw and some chocolate. DVDs such as when Harry Met Sally, Brief Encounter, or other ‘love’ films, and a copy of Graeme Green’s The End of the Affair.

A pile of old leather-bound books, a pair of slippers and a pipe.

A waistcoat and posh walking stick, maybe a hat, and a copy of a P G Wodehouse.

Laptop, notebook and phone and a novel – should have been working from home but got a bit distracted….

Cookery book, pinafore, shopping list, table plan, some napkins, and a note saying, ‘ You can’t get Yotam Ottolenghi ingredients in Petersfield.’

I think that is enough for now, but I have a longer list. Of course, I do.

We shall see if this ever works but I really hope it does.

Unearthed Treasures

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All gold mines must run out in the end, but we have still got some nuggets found in the dusty nooks and corners of the Oxfam shop’s upstairs rooms.

I could go on about how much this massive clear out is affecting us volunteers – who would have previously heard the sound of hoovering on a Wednesday afternoon? Who would have thought people would been keen to clean down the benches on a Friday afternoon or taken some mugs home to go through the dishwasher – and indeed who would have expected someone to say they were going to source a cafetière to make coffee a more palatable option……?

We mice are on a roll.

Now, to the uninitiated the back rooms of the shop would still look a chaotic mess, but to those of us who have been initiated it looks organised, tidy, under control, managed, purposeful  – and hoovered.

But enough of that, this is about more unearthed treasures.

We have amongst our number, a philatelist and when I unearthed a box of stamps and stamp albums, he was on my speed dial.

He took them home and I heard nothing more about it – though I did find a returned bag of worthless stamps which are now with out decoupage artist. I mentioned her before in case you need to back-track a couple of blogs.

Anyway, today he came in for a shift on the till. I was a bit (just a bit) cock-a-hoop because we have taken £600 on Tuesday and Wednesday (combined, let’s not get carried away) so it means we are again well on (my) target to get more than £1,000 for the week. 

But the takings for this morning were only £86, and I was a bit downbeat. 

‘I have got the money I have raised from selling those other stamps and it will go in the till this afternoon,’ he said.

I decided to wait until tomorrow to see the final total for today, so told him not to tell me how much.

I am pretty sure he thinks I am an idiot, or at the very least and most polite, suffering from a  bout of bizarre behaviour but I am going to wake up tomorrow with a small buzz of anticipation.

So the unearthed stamps have done their job.

Meanwhile as they say, I also unearthed four boxes of old and dated cameras. This is one of them (now dusted.)

And by unearthed, I mean some were under a bench behind yet another box of padded envelopes ( we could create a whole extensive ward of padded cells if needed), more under another bench behind three boxes of clarinet music….

Anyway, another volunteer does corporate filming and so knows his way around cameras.

He also knows about lighting so has fixed the lamps used for photographing the clothes we put online and has sourced some new special bulbs which had previously been declared as ‘too expensive’ to buy – they are £12 each. 

I have ordered two. Yes, me on no authority except that when we are taking £1400 a week, it makes sense to pay £24 to get the photos looking good. And yes, I am an unrepentant mouse.

So, back to the cameras.

He looked them over and knew what he was talking about.

Most were just those small cameras we all had for holiday snaps and are worthless, but some are lovely delights and some are worth putting on the internet.

The ones going in the shop are more attractive artefacts than anything a photographer would want to use, but when they are this lovely who cares?

I think this is a Kodak Junior?

So, we are doing a window on photography with books and the worthless camera stuff, and a table with the pretty delights we can sell. It is not done yet so if you want photos you will have to settle for these for now.

The cine camera works and has its own leather case and is yours for about £25…..

Meanwhile, under a previously mentioned stack of chairs, I found a sealed cardboard box – either never opened or opened and re-taped up.

Either way, inside was a whole collection of the postcards of first day stamp covers.

They are all pristine and absolutely lovely.

We have them out for sale at 5 for £1 and I think that maybe too cheap but hey ho, they will make money for Oxfam which they certainly were not going to do in a sealed cardboard box, under some chairs, upstairs.

When I was trying to corral all the padded envelopes – and do you know I found some in the electricity meter cupboard the other day – I wanted to put them on the top of some shelving.

We use padded envelopes to send out stuff bought online – but not by the box load, so they needed to be labelled, easily found and stored out of the way. Simples you’d have thought….

On the aforementioned top of the shelving, it turned out there were about 20 Oxfam produced cookery books.

They were published in 2010 so part of our new stock for that year, and maybe 2011. And probably not since.

So they could have been up there for a decade…..

But they were fine – if a little dusty – and though their barcode didn’t register on the till, we did not let that deter us.

I put them out on a bench and left a note to offer them to volunteers – a small thank you for all they have been doing – include hoovering.

When everyone who wanted one had taken one, we priced the rest and put them out for sale. They have sold.

Putting The Pieces Together

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This is a blog I wrote in November 2019 and apparently forgot to post.If you are interested in books, it will keep you going until more news of what is happening at the moment. It is not a bad read – though I say it myself and might well be wrong….

I have before complained about someone buying the very artefact I have built an Oxfam display around.

I know I have to sell it, but sometimes I wish that art gallery practice of just putting a red dot on it until we are ready to dismantle the display could operate – perhaps it could but I have never quite had the nerve.

This week artefact ‘stealing’ happened twice on one day.

Yes, really.

The table was, of course, a display of war and poppies. And recently someone donated a picture frame with a photo of a soldier, a notice of his bravery at Basra in 1917 and a very faded ( you would need a magnifying glass and patience to read it) letter presumably relating to what he had done.

I had piled up books and this picture on the table ready to arrange them into a display and gone out to go to get some milk.

Now, it is a rule that for Oxfam bookshop customers, there is nothing on the carefully arranged shelves as interesting as a haphazard, not yet displayed pile of books and stuff.

So, I was not entirely surprised when I came back to find my brilliant and unflappable colleague reporting that someone wanted to buy the ‘picture.’

Upstairs another good colleague was rootling around on Google to try and find mention of this soldier and therefore any idea if he was a little bit famous.

But nothing – no wikipedia, nothing except a mention in the London Gazette.

We did realise that to anyone from his family doing ancestor research, this would be a valuable item but tracking him down and then members of his extended family doing research would take a lot of time – time we don’t have lying around.

And, there is a bird in the hand argument.

So I went downstairs to talk to my colleague who had the customer’s number and my Best Beloved had called in, and was looking at the image.

Between us, we decided it was not a lot of monetary value but we would try say £9.99 and settle for £5.99 if haggled into it.

But my unflappable and brilliant colleague called him up and ignoring the collective ‘wisdom’, told the customer he could have it as the special price of £15. 

Ten minutes later he had called and collected it.

That afternoon, I was discussing the next window display with a good colleague.

Since our special window display person is currently indisposed, the role has fallen to me – this, it turns out was not a role I had to fight off all comers to take on.

Anyway, trying to maintain her high standards is proving a challenge and the current window was a good idea but not a success.

My colleague suggested using a small table with a half done jigsaw on it and lots of more puzzles on the wall along with puzzle books.

That reminded me that I had an old jigsaw on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be looked at, and how nice would that be half done with its wooden box propped up.

This was a puzzle with the counties of England and Wales on one side and the kings and queens of England on the other ( up to Edward VII if you are interested.)

I took to it my afternoon colleague on the till and asked if he would put it together to see if we had all the pieces.

The pieces were all in the shape of the counties so apart from the straight edges, none of the pieces were traditional jigsaw shapes.

I left him to it and then, needing some rubber gloves to clean silver, more on that some other time, I nipped out.

As I was leaving the shop, a couple of customers were talking to my colleague about the jigsaw.

When I got back, he had finished and all the pieces were there.

The customers had gone, but one of them had asked that when we found out how much it was worth, could he have first refusal.

So, again, I was upstairs Googling about to try and find out the price.

There was one which was the Scotland equivalent and someone was asking £600 for it but I did not think that was going to be realistic.

There was another on ebay for £40 but it had pieces missing – bound to severely affect the price.

Then I found an auction site which was willing to reveal the hammer price. Now, it was a lot with other things involved so I did some calculations and discussed it with my jigsaw-doing colleague and we thought £100.

But, inspired by my morning colleague’s efforts, I called the customer and said, ‘£150.’

He said, ‘£100.’

I said, ‘Cut the difference and £130’

He said, ‘I’ll be round in three minutes.’

And he was.

Of course, the displays will go on but sometimes its a shame not to have the A list stars on show.

A therapeutic clear out

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I am back in Oxfam (temporarily) and it is lovely – filling an Oxfam-shaped hole in my life – and below are some of the reasons why.

Now, I am a probably a bit over-excited so the list will be a long read, actually several long reads, so might put off all but the most hardened readers. 

(And there are no interesting photos but there will be in the next post, promise.)

Please don’t worry if you are not that hardened, I will never know that you went off to take up knitting.

So, the shop was looking rather thin, tired and sad.

Upstairs, there were crates of unlooked-at old books because no one had checked their value and put them out or online, the shelves were stuffed but chaotic, there was stuff /rubbish everywhere – stashed down the side of lockers, on the high shelves, under  stacks of chairs, under sorting benches, on the high tops of shelves, down the sides of cupboards, and and …..

We had alway known that, but with the agreement of the amazing new area manager, more of her in later instalments, we could clear out – and I mean really clear out.

Meanwhile donations had been turned away because those that were there, were not being sorted and shelved – and you can’t do that because who knows what value that turned away donation would have had.

And the takings were down to about £700 to £850 with weeks when only £600-something was the order of the day.

Now, of course, there were the pandemic and lockdowns to consider – and with the new ‘freedoms’ (don’t get me started on the handling of all this) bookshop life is easier – but even so….

This is only the pre-amble so again, you might want to heave a sigh and turn away. But if you stick with me there is a the (temporary) happy ending.

The shop is now looking fat, sleek and refreshed and last week we took more than £1200.

I will come back to that fattening later, but for now, upstairs – the behind-the-scenes work.

The shop manager is a hoarder and while the cat is away us mice have been having a therapeutic clear out.

We found whilst clearing/cleaning out for example ( not an exhaustive list by any means) :

Four irons and two ironing boards – we are a bookshop. 

We do indeed sell clothes online but our amazing online-clothes person takes them home to wash and iron, and even if she didn’t, we wouldn’t need four irons and two ironing boards. Even clothes shops have steamers, not irons, so goodness knows how long they have been stuffed down the side of those lockers.

Size cubes dating from 2004 – we know that because 2004 was the year of the Boxing Day Tsunami and that was the year we turned into a bookshop. 

Size cubes in case you are wondering, are those little bits of plastic that are on coat hangers to tell you that something is size 10 (I wish I was looking at those), 12, 14, 16 or XL or whatever. They are now on their way to an Oxfam clothes shop.

Three till drawers for tills that no longer exist in Oxfam, they are in the re-cycling bin.

Left-over red nose stuff from 2017 – apparently you need to take those back to Sainsbury’s and are in my car boot ready to do just that.

A broken hoover – we have two working others.

It has gone to the local tip thanks to a volunteer 

And another volunteer is taking one of the ironing boards – the one with no cover and just, just in case we need an ironing board in a bookshop, we kept one.

She has also taken a box of old postcards to be valued by a local auction house.

That box was on a shelf she decided to have a look at. 

They had been there as long as she could remember. They had been ignored for say, oh I don’t know, several years. Certainly all the eight years I had been working there and thought it was a box of official Oxfam paperwork – after all it was on that shelf.

Two large and heavy boxes of foreign coins – we can send them to be re-used in some way but have yet to find out where and how – but I should point out, we are volunteers holding the fort and this is not top of our list. Anyone who has any ideas, please let me know.

Five boxes of mobile phones – now we know there was an Oxfam contract to re-cycle these and I learned that all the gold medals at this year’s Olympics we made from gold from old mobile phones.

And they had been sitting there for say, let’s say accumulating, for several years. 

At the moment, there is a hiatus I understand, between contracts, so they are sorted, boxed up, properly stored and ready to go when we know where they need to go.

There is a stack of chairs for shop meetings that never happen –  we don’t have shop meetings because they ‘are a waste of time’ so when on a whim, I decided to pull them out and hoover – we still have two – I discovered another box full of old postcards in amongst the deep, deep dust and rather surprisingly, another box of light bulbs – we have about 40 of them found in nooks and corners and now in one place.

They, the postcards not the light bulbs, will be part of a lovely display on the newly installed display table.

So, that is enough for now but stayed tuned for how we mice have in the words of our new area manager – and there will be more about her – have started ‘breathing and making the shop sing.’

Chafing with Frank

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It has been a while since I sat down to write something which wasn’t an application for money.

Before you think that Deepest Sussex and its reluctant housewife have been plunged into penury, roasting badgers and growing lentils, I would like to say that this is money for a work project.

And that is something I have not been able to say for some years.

So along with all the usual stuff of life I, maybe, just maybe, be about to embark on a lovely, sparkly new work project- but there is many a slip between cup and research funding so will be biding my time and just hoping.

Meanwhile, the Oxfam bookshop carries on and I cook, and the two sometimes come together.

The aga is back on – though the weather has hardly justified it up until the last few days, I don’t care.

And when stuck on how to construct just the right paragraph for the money proposal, I will always go and rustle up a soup, or a supper, and sometimes will rustle among the dead geraniums and prop up a dahlia or two.

I have a lot of cook books and they fall into categories:

Ones I use a lot

Ones I use one recipe from 

Ones I used to use a lot

Ones I would like to cook from but am intimidated by ( see also Yotam Ottalenghi’s Guardian recipes for which buying the ingredients in Petersfield is a hopeless task. Think Odysseus or The Lord of the Rings in terms of difficulty and length of mission.)

Impulse buys from Oxfam – which tend to sit there for a bit then get taken back to the shop and re-sold.

And a grey folder with all those recipes I have ripped out of magazines, sent to be by my mother, scrawled on a envelope by a friend, wrestled from a chef in a restaurant…..

But I am a sucker for a cookery book and a great book title.

This is written by a man, Frank Schloesser, and brought to the public by the delightfully named publishers Gay and Bird in 1905.

( Apparently they published 113 books which included Frank’s other book, The Greedy Book, but also such interesting titles as Japanese Girls and Women, The Arab, The Horse Of The Future, Penelope’s Irish Experience and then her Experiences in Scotland – the mind boggles.

My favourite title is a book by one John Cutler: On Passing Off. The Illegal Substitution Of The Goods Of One Trader For The Goods Of Another Trader. Splendid! )

Back to Frank and his plans to convert the world to cooking with chafing dishes.

( From Wikipedia:

A chafing dish (from the French chauffer, “to make warm”) is a kind of portable grate raised on a tripod, originally heated with charcoal in a brazier, and used for foods that require gentle cooking, away from the “fierce” heat of direct flames. The chafing dish could be used at table or provided with a cover for keeping food warm on a buffet. Double dishes that provide a protective water jacket are known as bains-marie and help keep delicate foods, such as fish, warm while preventing overcooking.)

He explains that a chafing dish means that you have more in the way of tasty morsels than huge helpings of food, and quotes a Chinese proverb which says that ‘most men dig their graves with their teeth, meaning thereby that we all eat too much. This is awfully true and sad and undeniable, and avoidable.’

I have to say it is both undeniable in our house and we haven’t got round to the avoidable bit yet.

He doesn’t take his light suppers lightly and quotes Ruskin ( who knew Ruskin knew anything about domestic cookery.)

There is a chapter on Preliminaries which includes not only the recipe for Jellied Ham but an idea of what you should eat before and after different kinds of theatre experiences:

I am at a loss to know whether and East Room menu might be Indian food? And as for an A.B.C shop, I need a friendly food historian to tell me.

And Frank is a friendly food historian. His recipes are peppered with interesting historical references.

But he is also stern:

‘ By the way, in cooking soups, as indeed in all Chafing-Dish cookery, I cannot too earnestly insist upon the use of wooden spoons for all stirring manipulations. Metal spoons, even silver, are abhorrent to the good cook.’ 

And insists on ‘ the most scrupulous cleanliness…..

‘The Chafist who neglects his apparatuses unworthy of the high mission with which he is charged, and deserves the appellation of the younger son of Archidamus III, King of Sparta.Cleanliness is next to all manner of things in this dusty world of ours, and absolutely nothing conduces more to the enjoyment of a meal that one has cooked oneself than the knowledge that everything is spick and span, and that one has contributed oneself thereto by a little extra care and forethought.’

( And, no I have no idea what Achidamus’s son’s appellation was.)

I have looked through Frank’s recipes and although I am tempted by some including The Alderman’s Walk ‘a very old English delicacy, the most exquisite portions of the most exquisite joint in Cookerydom, and so called because, at City dinners of our grandfather’s times, it is alleged to have been reserved for the Aldermen. ( It is a saddle of Southdown mutton done in a sauce with bread.)

I am less entranced by the idea of eels with nettles though Frank assures me that ‘they give a peculiar zest to the dish which is quite pleasant.’

As for Frank himself, I can find nothing about him. 

I know he went on to the write The Greedy Book and they are both still around in second hand book sites, but of Frank there is nothing in Wikipedia or easily found.

I am sure there are food historians who know all about his Gallimaufrey and Ham in Hades, and love his short essay on the merits and otherwise of sauces, and could tell me everything from his boyhood onwards and if so, could they let me know.

Frank and I are cookery friends though I am not about to invest in a chafing dish however a useful present it would be.


Inside A Book

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One of the things about working in the Oxfam bookshop is that you don’t often get chance to really look at the books.

For a start, there is always a mountain of incoming donations to sort, and sift, assign, and price, and display.

Then there are the collections we need to build up to make a good table or window display – if the title fits put it in the box and keep on going.

And then there is making the shop look good, and then, and then, and then.

So, looking in detail at books is a rare pleasure and often outside the shift hours.

This is the story of one book and the people involved in it – at least as far as I can find out.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Not a first edition – that was 1927 – but the 1931 edition illustrated by Clare Leighton (and owned by someone called Leopold Horwood.)

  • Thornton Wilder
Clare Leighton

I would like to tell you a bit more. Though not about Leopold as I can’t find anything about him…..

This is the American writer’s second novel and he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. (The commercial success he got from the book meant he could give up being a French teacher and concentrate on writing.)

It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar, who witnesses the accident , then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die. ( Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, as they say, Clare Leighton was born in 1898 (died in 1989) and lived her early life in the shadow of her older brother – her family’s nickname for her was the bystander. (That must have helped her self confidence.)

(He was Roland Leighton and despite being described as rather cold and conceited by his friends, he fell in love and got engaged to Vera Britten and was immortalised in her Testament of Youth.

He died aged 20 in the World War One and his grave has one of his poems to Vera inscribed on it.

But this is not about him, but his sister. We have one of her woodcuts hanging about our coat rack.

She did her first training at Brighton College of Art – which is the only link I can find to Deepest Sussex but it will get a mention when the book goes on sale as we like a local link.

(Clare Leighton met the radical journalist H. N. Brailsford in 1928,and they lived together for several years because his wife refused him a divorce.

But when the wife died in 1937, leaving the way clear for the couple to marry, he suffered an emotional breakdown, destroying his relationship with Clare Leighton who left for a new life in the US in 1939 and eventually became a naturalised American citizen.She never married. )

She had a fascination with the countryside and her woodcuts are often of rural people and scenes.

One of her most famous books – The Farmer’s Year – was published by Longmans Green which also published The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

And that is the only connection I can find between Leighton and this book. Perhaps she owed them a favour, or was asked by a very nice member of staff or perhaps she did a deal with them.

It is just that if you look at these images they jar slightly and though dark, like most of her woodcuts and clearly by her, they don’t seem to work – at least not for me.


The Timing of Books (and Brexit)

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There are times in ( I assume) any Oxfam bookshop when things are less than entrancing. 

The teetering pile of unsorted books topped with a Jeremy Clarkson or two, just for example.

Or souvenir books of royal weddings past, or scrawled-in children’s books, or sudoko books with some of them half done, or the complete works of Georgette Heyer damp and very brown

I could go on but don’t want to sound ungrateful  – though there are days when gratitude is a little thinly spread.

And there are days when the work, the slog, the efforts, the imagination and planning, when the whole making-the shop look good is not met with much, or indeed any appreciation, but don’t get me started on that.

But on other days we get such little delights that it makes it all worthwhile and I will entice you to read on with the promise that I will include a little delight or two at the end.

Meanwhile there is an issue of timing

Some books are time-specific.

The huge old bible we were given is a bit ramshackle but it has whatever the bookshop equivalent of kerb-appeal may be. But finding it in a pile of unsorted books on Easter Monday doesn’t quite work. ( We only do religion once a year…and I had just cleared the religion table display.)

The 51 copies of the magazine The Great War, I Was There! have arrived just too late. The four year leading up to 2018 was their moment and now it is gone. The World War II anniversaries are just gearing up. 

Anyway, the jolly exclamation mark made me wince a bit…

There is already a shelf or indeed two of Christmas books waiting for their turn.

And oddly for a bookshop, we have had a donation of a good number of sunglasses. 

So, I have to monitor the weather forecast and work out what books would work with sunglasses.

Do we go for light summer reads, books with sun in their title ( fewer than you might think), celeb autobiographies so we can put a pair on Johnny Depp’s or Bridgit Bardot’s but that might take several year’s to get together – you can’t order donated books.

But today I found a book that had its day in 1938 and now, reading its preface, seems so prescient.


Now if that isn’t a Brexit warning, I don’t know what is. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg tells us that Brexit will deliver cheaper footwear – did anyone, however fervent, vote for Brexit so they could nip down to Clarks and get a good deal?

He also tells us that the full benefits of Brexit may take 50 years. I am thinking that the food issue might need sorting before that.

We have six trade deals in the bag including one with the Faroe Islands.

Here is the Wikipedia explanation of Faroese food – some of which we could no doubt import.

Traditional Faroese food is mainly based on meat, seafood and potatoes and uses few fresh vegetables. Mutton of the Faroe sheep is the basis of many meals, and one of the most popular treats is skerpikjøt, well aged, wind-dried mutton, which is quite chewy. The drying shed, known as a hjallur, is a standard feature in many Faroese homes, particularly in the small towns and villages. Other traditional foods are ræst kjøt (semi-dried mutton) and ræstur fiskur, matured fish. Another Faroese specialty is tvøst og spik, made from pilot whale meat and blubber. (A parallel meat/fat dish made with offal is garnatálg.) The tradition of consuming meat and blubber from pilot whales arises from the fact that a single kill can provide many meals. Fresh fish also features strongly in the traditional local diet, as do seabirds, such as Faroese puffins, and their eggs. Dried fish is also commonly eaten.

Now, I am an increasing fan of fewer food airmiles, locally-grown, seasonally-eaten food but I am not at all sure that our farmers can adapt to suddenly growing more cabbages, potatoes, enough wheat for our bread.

And though I know a surprisingly tasty recipe for turnips, I am not sure that will take the place of peppers, camembert, olives, grapes, and though I love Isle of Wight tomatoes, I am not sure there will be enough to go round.

Anyway, that is all not about books or what you find in an Oxfam bookshop so I’ll end with some slivers of delight of stuff that make sorting through a tonne of books on a Bank Holiday, and when you get to the end and stand back, someone else comes in with ten boxes….

Nice Coincidences

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It has been a time of small coincidences in the Petersfield Oxfam bookshop.

(I’m no believer in fate, or things that were meant to be, but I like a nice coincidence as much as the next woman.)

One day recently, I was sorting through a small avalanche of donations and my mind began to wander to the catering for our annual winter lunch.

Feeding 30 plus people is not in itself hard as long as you chose your menu wisely.

Individual soufflés anyone?

Last year I made pies and I am, though I say it myself, a reasonable shortcrust pastry maker but pastry does require a bit of faff and multiply that by 30 people’s worth of faff and I shan’t do that again this year.

One year I made a chicken something or another which I got from inside my head rather than any recipe book and that was all very well until I learned a well-know chef had decided to come. 

My lodestar for deciding what to cook is a farmer friend who likes his food, is always very appreciative and – because he can’t do with eating standing up – he leads the way to our outdoor table and others follow, thus easing the elbow-to-elbow crush in the house.

So, there I am thinking about what he would like, his exacting palate – and praying it doesn’t rain.

And I am still book-sorting away when I came across this little foodie delight.

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Usually, we have out winter lunch two weeks before Christmas which means it would be on December 16th but because of pressure on that end of the month, we decided to have it on the 9th.

So imagine my pleasure at finding that inside the book was this:

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Of course that doesn’t quite fit into the perfect coincidence, but it was nice non the less.

So, I thought I would have a read and see if there was any recipe I could use……..

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I am still not entirely clear what gets passed through a sieve…. and who would have thought Bovril was an essential ingredient in 1930s Chile?

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There is no doubt, none at all, that that asparagus would be well and truly cooked through….

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Chicken meringue – I am not sure my farmer friend would go for that.

And finally,

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It was interesting to gather that not everyone who bought this book would have had access to ice – no fridges.

Call me a lax cook if you will, but I decided against trying to source Nelson’s gelatine and boiling tins of pineapple, straining them through rinsed napkins and then adding green food colour.

Leaving recipes behind, I turned my attention to natural history. It is hard to be sure any patterns when it comes to what is donated to the shop.

Just as you lament the lack of paperback fiction, the shelves are nearly bare and you think, this at last must be the Kindle effect, a tonne of novels arrive.

So, I am hesitant to share my theory on natural history books but here goes anyway.

We used to get lots and lots of books about natural history – from birdwatching to fossils to geology to, and given where we are this is not surprising, a lot of copies of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne.

( I always saved a particularly good version of this to see at Christmas – it makes a good present.)

Recently though, we have had very little and when I say recently, I mean perhaps the last year or so.

My theory is that people no longer look at the small and local and want to see Blue Planet or programmes about lions of the Kalahari.

But we do occasionally get copies of books from the New Naturalist Series – they have marvellous covers and sell very well.

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(I could bore you with the background information on why some are worth much more than others but I am guessing you don’t really, in your heart of hearts, want to know.)

Anyway, we have had some in recently so I put together a table display of them and some other stragglers of natural history. 

It sold so well that instead of lasting a week, I had to re-think the table three days later.

We also get some books in the Wayside and Woodland series published by Frederick Warne. 

And, just after I had re-done the table, I’m sorting some books, and this came in.

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How interesting I thought, it is by a woman. I wonder who she was.

And inside I found this:

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It says that her book, this book I am holding in my hand, was the first book on dragonflies to ‘achieve wide popular readership.’ ( Now apparently worth about £25.)

It also says that Cynthia Longfield used some of her ‘ample private means’ to part sponsor the chartering of a ship containing ‘a band of natural historians’ who went on a exploratory trip to the Pacific.

She travelled widely in Africa:’ I find machetes so useful in the jungle.’

And guess what else it says about the Cynthia – she was asked to contribute a volume to the New Naturalist Series which ‘ quickly sold out, changing hands at a high premium until it was re-printed.’

Indeed the 1960 first edition is now worth about £90.

We have a copy. It came in with the other New Naturalists and my colleague who collects them valued them for me, so I didn’t notice her name. It is in our cabinet of valuable books.

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Satisfying coincidences all round.

One Thursday in Oxfam

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I arrive at the shop carrying two very heavy, and large history books. Not just any history books but two of three volumes ( we don’t have the missing one,) of a history of the Kings and Queens of England compiled in 1706.

The entry on each ruler was done by a different author – one of them being John Milton.

The front covers were there but not attached, but the sound of the paper as you turn the pages is that lovely sound of really old, good paper and you can see the ’s’s were printed  as ‘f’s’ – and, of course, all of it was set and printed by hand.

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Because of the condition, and the missing volume, they couldn’t be sold for much and although £5.99 for the two is ridiculously cheap, given the 312 years they have survived, it is a realistic price for us – I have checked (exhaustively).

There is more about these books, but before I go any further, I must warn you that this was a long and very busy day and so, if you were planning a quick read, now is the time to give up, and go and do what you were planning to do.

It is 9am.

The first thing we always do on a Thursday is to to get the kettle on.

Then we had a meeting.

Now in our shop, we don’t have manager-called staff/volunteer meetings – I think the last one was a year ago – but we do need to sort out the run up to Christmas, so we had a one amongst ourselves. 

The five of us who were there, set about thinking through what could be on the table and what could be in the window, how we could make the shop look extra good in the run up to our best selling time of year.

And now we have a list – it might change, not least because we have to have the books to fit the ideas – and that is always a gamble when you are relying on donations.

(We have some things in hand. For the past six months, we have been collecting books on the World War I ready for November’s anniversary, we have a good collection of photography books, ancient civilisations and some others…)

I will talk/have meetings with other books-sorters over the coming weeks and tell them what we have come up with, and we will no doubt change, develop, amend ideas depending on what they say.

Still, we have a plan, and that feels good.

I am not a great fan of Christmas, but in the shop, I love it. 

This is the time when we can really make money, and more than that, we can really make it look extra  good.

It is now about 10am.

I go out to get the prescription medicine from Boots, the copy of The Times and the bird food that I collect every week for a volunteer who fell over, nearly three years ago, and broke her wrist.

She thought it would mean be a few weeks off and she would be back, but ill-health and a badly-set wrist, has meant she hasn’t been.

So every week, I collect the stuff she needs and my, excellent in so many ways, fellow volunteer D, takes them to her on his way home and he, or I, sometimes slip in a treat of chocolate as it is not much fun being old and not well, and having no family around.

We tell her they are Oxfam gifts.

Anyway, I get back to find that the aftermath of the parish church’s fete means that literally trolley loads of unsold books are heading our way.

D, realising that we would be inundated, has persuaded the church donor to let him go through the books at the church and just take the ones he thought we could sell. 

He has gone off to do so.

Phew.

I took over sorting the books that had come in.

It is now about 11 am.

I am still sorting. D comes back, and we carry on sorting and pricing and shelving. Him upstairs and me downstairs.

A young woman comes in asking for a volunteer form. I tell her that the process will take some weeks, but we are looking forward to her joining us.

She is volunteering at Christmas, she tells us, to cook and serve food to people who are one their own over the festivities, and she really likes books and wants to work here too.

I wonder whether the very long silence between her putting her form in and hearing from us will put her off – I hope not.

Meanwhile, J, the person who is on the till, unflappable, calm, organised and ever-helpful, has cleared and re-shelved the previous books on the the table, so that we can surround the books mentioned at the start, with other – not as interesting, but hey ho – history books.

(Every week, she polishes the table in between displays, with proper wood-feeding polish and elbow grease. ‘It needs to look good,’ she said when she sent me out to buy some decent polish a few months ago.)

Our window is dressed/designed by another volunteer called J.

She does a different, and very good, window every other week. Customers come in and comment on it.

We are on week-two of the art window so she has re-jigged, up-dated, got ‘new’ stock in it to make it look good.

(It has sold very well – including the prints from books that my husband has framed – not bad at £45 each, and a boost to the weekly income.)

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Given that she wasn’t re-doing the whole window, and she was thinking ‘art’, and as she was looking to do something else useful, she gets most of the art books from upstairs and brings them down onto the art shelves – those shelves were looking a bit thin but now they look fat and healthy.

She also re-does the podiums and other stylish stuff – her forte.

D and I are still sorting books.

J, the one on the till, needs change – customers buying a £2.49 book with a £20 note…. and, as she checks the state of the blue change bag upstairs every Thursday morning and almost invariably finds a £10 note in it, she tells me to get change so the next shift will have their change ready as well the change she needs. 

So, I go next door to the HSBC bank where they know me – and supply pound coins by the basket full.

(One of the women who works there, had told me her son was really interested in natural history. So one day recently, when getting pound coins, I gave her a book on Darwin’s Beagle voyage. 

I was going to throw it away – it was not in a good enough state to sell and it was a small thank you for all the change they give us – but I thought it might be a bit too advanced for her young son.

Some weeks later she told me that he had loved it, and read it throughout the long flight to South Africa – and is now re-reading it. 

One of the other bank-tellers is Polish but/and is fascinated by the English language and semiotics (she did her masters in English language.) So, every now and then I give her a book on language – one that we would throw away  – and she reads it, and then tells me about it when I am in there getting change.)

Meanwhile, donations are coming in.

The re-cycle bin is full.

We now have a written briefing by our manager to say that we are not allowed to put the books into the general bin – there would be an additional cost to the shop.

And the donations are coming in.

D and I fill carrier bags, Ikea bags, any bags we can find, with books destined for the book-afterlife – as well as boxes of books that might find a buyer somewhere and somewhen via Oxfam’s central warehouse.

The bags will have to wait until the re-cycle bin is emptied – but that happens when?

We don’t know what the emptying regime is.

And we fill crates of books that we think we can sell, and which need pricing and shelving, presenting – and hopefully – selling.

D has to go – his father is ill in hospital and his mother has a broken wrist – but he has come in, and we would not have coped without him.

And, he will still make time to deliver the medicine, bird food, The Times, and have a chat with the now almost-housebound volunteer I mentioned earlier –  these days I see her more rarely than he does, but we speak on the phone. 

Meanwhile, one of our volunteers who works a shift on Wednesday afternoons and comes in as well, yes for another shift, on a Thursday when there is a need, has called in.

He comes in every Thursday morning to see if he is needed in the afternoon.

This Thursday he had come in, early in the morning, and asked if he needed to come in later and, if not, he had something else to do. 

I had said, blithely, that we could manage.

But that was a mistake.

Because, as he was leaving, D mentions that the afternoon till volunteer is not coming in.

It is now about 12 noon.

I haven’t yet been upstairs – I had been a bit busy – to see on the calendar that the afternoon volunteer was away.

And you need two people in the shop to be Oxfam-legal. And that left only me for the afternoon.

So, I call the shop manager and left a message asking if he could give me the Thursday extra-volunteer’s number so then I could ask him if he could, in fact, come in.

The manager calls back to say he had called the volunteer’s home and heard he was out for the afternoon and he says, ‘ You will just have to  close the shop.’

I am annoyed for not looking at the calendar – and there are still books to be sorted, in fact lots of them, so I should be doing something more useful than just berating myself.

Closing the shop, of course, means we lose sales, and things are never good enough that we want to want to do that.

The calm, unflappable volunteer J, who is more than active but not used to doing a full day’s work these days, says, ‘ Give me half an hour to go home and get some lunch, and I will come back and do the afternoon with you.’

I hugged her, but thought that there must be someone else.

I call a volunteer who turned out to be in Sheffield minding her grandchildren, another who said she was picking up her grandchildren, another who was out, another had a doctor’s appointment and so on and so on, and then finally another volunteer calls back and said he is driving back from Southampton, so will be a bit late but yes, he will come in.

I don’t hug him – but I would have. 

He is also called J.

It is now about 1.30pm.

J comes in and between us, during the afternoon, we get almost every donated book sorted, him upstairs and me downstairs – in a bag ready to go in a bin when one is available, in a box to go to the warehouse, or priced and on a shelf.

We talk about the crates we need to set up ready to receive books we were going to collect for the window and table in the run up to Christmas.

We talk about clearing the box of overflow travel books which has been sitting upstairs  – and ignored – for weeks and weeks –  and which, I have to say, is full of books many of which shouldn’t ever hit our shop shelves.

We talk about Monday morning when he would be in, and Monday afternoon when I would be in, and how we could overlap so that we can do some ‘real sorting out.’ 

(All getting ready for the Christmas run – we are nothing if not getting ready.)

Meanwhile, I am on the till.

I count during the afternoon, and 11 people who come into the shop look at those special history books – remember those from the beginning?

None of them buy those books, but so many of them talk to me about them. ( And, they do sell the next day and the volunteer who sold them was so pleased, she contacted me to tell me.)

And some of those customers go on on to buy other books.

That is what a good table does – it draws people into the shop and, hopefully, they go on to buy other books.

We like the table to be noticed – and customers notice the table, and more than the table, they notice the window, volunteers notice and comment on them – and that makes worthwhile all the weeks of effort, collecting, organising, thinking about them, planning.

Meanwhile, J and I sort more donations.

Every shift says that they get more donations than any other time of the week, but the truth is, thankfully or we would be in deep trouble, they come in all the time.

The last one comes in at 4.50 and we close at 5 ….. but J and I clear it.

It is a very good feeling to look around the back room and the upstairs room and know that you have sorted it all, well, more or less.

Meanwhile, J has also re-stocked the academic shelves, and I have re-stocked cookery, putting all the cooks/chefs in alphabetical order – probably a bit OCD but commentated on favourably by a customer. 

I have changed the front-facing books – and that matters because they sell more quickly, and also customers notice if they are same week after week – I have sold three newly front-faced books in the afternoon.

And three ‘art works’ from the window, by the way.

I have put out a collection of ‘old and interesting’ travel books on the top shelf of that module and made a mental note that the travel shelves really need a good sort out – perhaps on Monday if I have time…..

Meanwhile, a customer come in (and says in passing, as people do when you engage with them, he used to be a violin player but was now a singer), and he had been in the week before, and bought £30 worth of classical CDs.

I had heard about this from another volunteer and had texted the classical music volunteer to tell him so – usually in on a Thursday, but away at the moment.

He was, not surprisingly, pleased.

This visit the customer bought only a few CDs, but he wanted to say that our ‘classical volunteer’ knows what he is about.

And, yes, I text the volunteer again even though I know he is on a ramblers’ scout for a long walk in the Cotswolds.

Meanwhile, there is a ham and coleslaw sandwich in the fridge that I never had time to eat.

It is 5 pm.

And time to shut up shop and see how much we have made.

Before I cash up, I look around the shop and I see a clear back room – of course it  it won’t stay like that, but it is a good moment.

I straighten the paperback fiction and the children’s fiction, put one or two books straight on the table, check that the window has no gaps, make a list of things that need doing on Monday, talk to J who is just putting a few new books on the academic shelves and who will be in on Monday to start all over again….

I am just locking up the shop when I see a man approaching.

On Monday when I was shutting up, my fellow volunteer said ‘No, you can’t shut yet.’ 

She told me that there was a regular who came and got to the shop depending on when the bus arrived – and it was always just before or after 5pm.

So, today I held the door open for him.

He bought nothing today, but on Monday he might, and he really appreciated that he could get in to our shop even if the bus was a bit late.

We made about £268 –  not bad for a Thursday.