Phones and Faff

September 16, 2018September 9, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I do realise that you, dear reader, may wince at the mention of Christmas but for those of us beavering away at the retail of second-hand books, things need to be started on that front.

For some years, I have been telling you about how we start stockpiling books in exceptionally good condition to boost our Christmas trade and that means lots of crates around the upstairs room with notes on them saying they need to be left well alone until I decide we need to start putting them out.

Well, last week, another volunteer and I decided we needed to clear some space to slot empty, waiting crates into.

The shop manager is nothing if not a man to throw anything away or deal with anything today when several months hence might do just as well.

(I have this feeling that if you dig hard enough under bottom shelves, behind boxes, at the back of etc etc you could easily find a mummified body of an apparently unmissed volunteer.)

However, what we found most of during this clear out, was lots and lots of mobile phones.

People can, and apparently do often, donate old mobile phones and Oxfam has some system of getting them re-used or their innards taken out, or whatever.

But to do that they need to be sent somewhere. Only the manager knows where, and he had clearly decided that there was no rush.

There were about three carrier bags and a sizeable box of them.

So, we pulled them out of their dark corner – where there was also a hoover which to the best of my knowledge has not be employed for the past say two or three years, a 1960s box for carrying records which had been stashed with out of date cameras and lenses…..

Anyway, we put the phones into crates and put them in the other room, not too far from the kettle, so they couldn’t be ignored.

Next time I went in, the manager had put them all into cardboard boxes, neatly labelled as mobile phones for re-cycling and put them back where they were before!

And they will probably be there next Christmas.

In that clear out/up, I also found a box of Coalport houses – I had checked them and priced them and put them back in the box and promptly forgotten about them – though I do remember thinking they would work on a Christmas table, so all is not lost.

This time of year also means the annual ritual of crab apple jelly.

I am sure I have said before that what was once a nod towards earth mother meets Sussex housewife, lost much of its charm on the basis it is a faff to make and we don’t eat it/remember to give it away over the year, and so is now in a stash in the cellar.

Anyway, this year we have, for the first time, a quince harvest and if anything quince jelly is even more of a faff, but it has the advantages novelty and you can make membrillo from the left over pulp.

So, I put a notice in the village shop window offering our crab apples to any takers and this afternoon, as I sit writing this, a family are doing their best to clear the tree and are raking up the windfalls in the process.

Excellent.

Oxfam Trials, Tribulations and Surprises

April 8, 2018April 18, 2018 / aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

There have been a few trials and tribulations in the Oxfam bookshop of late – and then one really nice surprise with a rather spooky twist.

Oxfam’s trials and tribulations nationally and internationally don’t seem to have filtered down to Petersfield – there seems to be pretty much the same number of people donating to us as ever there was.

Turning out aged parents’ home, downsizing house and therefore books, bibliophiles with a one-in-one-out policy and the collections of religious books with the surprisingly frequent copy of the Kama Sutra tucked in……

(Yesterday was the 5th time in my Oxfam career, I found a copy and usually they are small and rather pretty but this one was the full works including – I had only a quick glance – advice on scratching……)

No, that wasn’t the surprise with the spooky twist.

Neither was the very nice man, Terry, from the Chichester shop.

For this ‘episode’ of the story to work you have to know that we are ruthless about the books we put out for sale. And that means a lot of donations go into recycling sacks.

The book may be in perfectly good order, clean and bright, as we say, but to the best of my book-selling knowledge no one in Petersfield wants a copy of the book about the fairytale marriage of Charles and Diana.

Nether do they want the 2011 Top Gear annual, nor indeed, and it pains me to say this, any of Michael Palin’s books of his travels – although once I sold a copy of Himalaya.

So, the recycling sacks are an essential part of the shop’s DNA but low and behold when the nice East European man came to collect them on Tuesday he didn’t have any empty ones to give us so, by Wednesday ,we had run out.

That means that we had boxes and boxes and bags and piles of books with no long term future sitting around and taking up space.

And it turns out we weren’t the only shop with the problem. I took a call from someone from the Chichester shop asking if we had any spare. But we had none.

We, luckily, get two re-cycling collections a week so I left rather stern instructions that when the man came on Friday we needed two sacks of empty sacks.

He only had one.

There is apparently, a national shortage of the right recycling sacks.

Anyway, we got all our ‘waste’ books into sacks and still had a few leftover and on Saturday I was on the till when a man walked in with a picture.

He told me he was Terry and he had brought us a picture ( a print, not the real thing) by Flora Twort – Petersfield’s only famous (and dead) artist.

He said that he expected we could get more for it in our shop than in Chichester. I was very impressed he had taken he time and bother and so I raided our precious bag of recycling sacks and sent him away with our last armful – he seemed to think it was a fair deal.

Right, to the surprise with a twist.

A colleague had put aside a book for me with a note on it saying someone had priced it at £3.99 but she thought it might be worth ‘a bit.’

Indeed, it is.

So far, our book expert ( with me as his assistant, of course,) think that it is worth in the region of £750 to £850.

It is a large and 1933 version of a A-Z of London with added stuff such as the parliamentary constituencies, legal boundaries, London administrative districts and so on.

And and this is a delight, a tube map pre Harry Beck which is particularly interesting as Beck designed it in 1933 – this book would have gone to print as Harry was busy thinking up his brilliant design.

I suspect, given what I can find by Googling about, that the book will be taken apart, the maps framed and those sold off at a considerable mark up.

But the real spooky surprise was found when I was showing it to a fellow volunteer and we were looking at the maps of where she was born and grew up – then we turned to map of Peckham where I lived for a while.

This book is pristine and someone had a slipcover made to keep it that way. There are no internal markings except one – a biro mark along the road where I used to live in Peckham.

A Few Mysteries

January 29, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

We have had a few mysteries in the bookshop recently.

At this time of year, we often get unwanted Christmas presents and that can only be the explanation for two copies of the same – rather unusual cookbook – in separate donations on the same day.

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(Perhaps there are a few hungry dogs in deepest Sussex as we speak – and no, though Jessie, our’s – and Mungo, not our’s but here now and then – would have been very pleased to see me walk through the door with it, I have not brought one home.)

Whilst we are on animal books – who would have guessed there would be such a book as this:

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Then, we had quite a few boxes of sci-fi books – a rarity in our neck of the woods.

Now, at the risk of heaping down on my head accusations of arrant sexism and stuff, I would have expected them to have been donated by a man.

But no, they were donated by a woman of a certain age who brought them in over several days with the help of a sack truck – all carefully boxed and labelled.

As it happened, the day after we got them all Ursula Le Guin died – one of the few famous women sci-fi writers.

Now, I feel I should read more sci-fi – well, any, actually – but I really know nothing much about it.

Yes I did know who Ursula Le Guin was and that she had written Earthsea, and Iain M Rankin, Neil Gaiman and his collaboration with Terry Pratchett who I have read a lot, and I was looking for a good copy of War of Worlds……so I am not altogether ignorant but pretty much so.. )

By coincidence, a fellow volunteer who happened to be in at that time, said he was a bit of a sci-fi fan – a surprise to me – and would sort out the wheat from the chaff as it were.

So, all those coincidences added up to a table display.

Then this, – donated separately but had to be displayed together. I hesitate to say Pauline was being indiscreet – but who knows?

Meanwhile, our antiquarian book expert told me a while ago that old crime novels could be quite valuable so when some came in, I though I would look them up and we could do a table on crime – not least because we have a boxful of those old green penguins which are mostly crime too.

Who would have thought that someone called Clive Witting was so much in demand – the covers though are a delight and someone will want them just for the look of them.

( No, I haven’t read them…nor did I remember to photograph them so just let your imagine run riot and meanwhile appreciate this, and yes I do know that it is of its era:)

Then there was the Nabakov donation.

Everything he had ever written as far as I could tell, along with a few biographies of the great man.

But not a copy of Lolita – the most famous book he ever wrote and indeed the only one that most people have heard of.

So, now we have two boxes of Nabakov waiting for a copy of Lolilta to appear – something like this first edition – preferably signed…..

This little booklet is no mystery – except why anyone would give it away – what a little delight.

And this, another lovely little book, has all its fold out maps intact – again, why would you give that away?

Of course, we are grateful to everyone who does given them away to us, allow us to ‘re-home’ them, and raise money for such good causes.

Mind you, I am not sure who needs this book in their life – any aspiring civil servants out there?

Gold Stars

January 9, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

So, there I was telling you all about how we were preparing for Christmas in the Oxfam bookshop, when little did I know that a really big cheese in Oxfam shops was planning a (nearly) night before Christmas visit.

He is a nice man and lives relatively locally so this should have just been taken in our stride – but I wanted to have gold stars raining down on us.

I dragooned other volunteers into extra tasks, fretted and chivvied and tidied and organised, and I went into the shop every day in the run up – ignoring my own plans to approach my own Christmas with a zen-like calm and to be festively organised for the rather extensive flow of family and friends.

Making sure the table was all set up and rather lovely – though I say it myself and (metaphorically) patting down my apron and brushing back a lock from my sweaty brow, I awaited his arrival.

He was running late. He had to go back to Oxford to sign something.

I titivated – which in Oxfam bookshop terms, means re-arranged front-facing books, got all the craft section in order of hobby – knitting, sewing, teddy bear making, ancient Chinese calligraphy, etc.

Biography was in alphabetical order of subject, literature was actually literature and no stray copy of Jeffrey Archer was lurking there, all the books which had been donated were sorted, children’s books were all of excellent quality and looked enticing etc etc.

Yes, of course, I had made sure all this was already done….but I needed to keep busy.

I had planned to walk him around what we had been doing behind the scenes to make sure our Christmas sales were a success, and then hand him over to the till – he wanted to spend time in the shop – with a pre-primed lovely volunteer.

But he was late and then when he did arrive, he had phone calls he had to make.

I forced him to admire the table, made him a cup of tea and gave him a delicious pastry made by our Syrian refugee volunteer, and left.

He made his calls.

Then he left – he never made it to the till or to admire just how well organised and lovely the shop looked.

I was just a little deflated.

He did say he would come and volunteer for another shift – I just hope it is not a surprise visit on a wet Wednesday when I have been a little less than enthusiastic about getting everything looking just tickety-boo – I want those gold stars.

Sappho and Christmas 2017

December 12, 2017December 12, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

So, if you don’t get your Oxfam retail act together for Christmas sales, you are in trouble.

We, or less modestly I should say, I have been hoarding books for Christmas since late August – and not just any old books but those which are in such mint condition no one would know they are second hand.

Upstairs in the shop there have been teetering piles of plastic crates with imperious labels on them saying ‘please leave for table display’ or ‘please leave for Lucy to deal with’ or ‘gets your mitts off, I have these put aside for special use’ – no, not the last one.

Now here is a weird thing.

In the autumn sometime I had found an art book called Pastoral Landscapes which had lovely woodcut images which had links to pastoral poets. Never seen one before – and it was worth a bit.

A fellow volunteer, let’s call him Jim, was recently in the shop and, as ever, more than diligently sorting books, when I reached into one of those crates to show him this nice book.

We chatted about it and I went back to put it back for later use – and then he called to me.

I went into the other room, where he was, and the next book he had pulled out of the bag he was sorting was, yes dear reader, another copy of the very same book….

They have both sold.

Indeed by now almost all of the excellent Christmas gift books have sold so I am down to sorting out the ‘dregs’ and working out what table display to make of them.

When I work it out – actually that will be Thursday – it will be I think a green and red display and then next week we will go for the nativity look – though you have to race in immediately after Christmas to get rid of it as there is nothing worse than a nativity after the event.

We open Sundays in the run up to Christmas and so I had the key to the shop and, against the rules, went in early to create a Christmas table I had been planning – a blue table.

It was all blue china set out like a table setting with blue books on it and loathe though I am to take any credit, so many people said how lovely it looked.

Now here is the thing, the table stuff sold slowly – but that is not just what it is there for (though that is nice too.)

It is there to get people into the shop and to appreciate what an effort we have made, how nice it looks, how we work to make the window and table look good every week of the year and especially at Christmas – and then go on to buy other books.

And they did.

That week, we made £2,499.87 – I think any volunteer in the shop would have put in that extra 13p to round it up if we had known.

By the way, you see that books called Snowflake and Schnapps? Well, it was a lovely cookery book – and dear reader, I was tempted.

But, lacking milk for essential tea-making one day, I went to Waitrose to get some and bumped into a regular customer who I knew to be a cook/proper chef type and I told him about it.

Once I had the milk, I went to the bank or something, and by the time I got back to the shop, there he was with it in his hand.

I had to take a photo of one recipe I had my eye on and he said we would share the books’s recipes, but no way was he letting it go.

So, one or two other little stories:

I have a habit of setting the people on the till a challenge to sell a particular book that shift.

So, we had a volunteer, let’s call her Margaret, who had a book to sell and when I came down from sorting things out upstairs (aka behind-the-scenes), it was still there on the desk.

I was berating her, in an oh-so-jocular fashion about the fact it was still there, and a couple heard us talking and said they hadn’t noticed it before but how lovely it was.

The man said his daughter was an artist – and it was an art book – so Margaret and I went into overdrive extolling its attributes.

But, he said, his daughter was a children’s book illustrator and this book wouldn’t be for her.

Oh, said I brightly, I can’t stop now, I have to get home, but I am sure I have a book on children’s illustrators somewhere upstairs. Give you number to Margaret and I will call you when I find where I have put it.

He did. I did. He bought it. Margaret sold the other book to the next customer.

The small books are often the interesting ones and I found one which was Sappho’s poetry with art nouveau illustrations of the period, about 4 inches tall, handcut pages and rare-ish.

I was showing it to a volunteer, let’s call her Judith, and we were admiring the illustrations.

She is a lovely woman who gardens, paints and decorates not only her own house but her son’s, she and I talk auctions, antiques, cooking, she also is an excellent needlewoman I understand, and she treks in by bus to volunteer with us.

She is a woman of a certain age and, given that we were talking about Sappho, the subject got onto sexuality, gender, homosexuality, gender fluidity, transgender issues, what a waste a good looking gay man is to us heterosexual women – however older we may be.

And, how all these issues should be on a live and let live and let’s get past it basis – all the normal chat of an Oxfam volunteering conversation – but apparently not one her granddaughter had expected to find so easy when she had broached the subject.

(Don’t, granddaughters, assume stuff about your lovely grandmas.)

The book was worth a bit, so we agreed what we needed was a relatively well off lesbian shopping in Oxfam Petersfield for that just so unusual Christmas present.

The book is still in our cabinet should you be that person.

Nearly Rack and Ruin

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

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

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

Marigold Hotel on the action movies shelf, for example.

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

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

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

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

And yes, of course it looks better.

Anyway enough of a rant.

Here are a few good things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The issue is, when to put them out.

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

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

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

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

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

That happened with the Yemeni maps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mamie Dickens Signed This Book

September 1, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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

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

I take my hat off to him.

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

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

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

But this one has this dedication:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Can’t Happen Here

August 16, 2017August 23, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Recently a book came into the shop which I hadn’t seen before and was called ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ by John Sinclair originally published in 1935 and (smartly) re-issued this year by Penguin.

The blurb says:

‘A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States – and wins. Sinclair Lewis’s chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, ‘Professional Common Man’, who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path. As the new regime slides into authoritarianism, newspaper editor Doremus Jessup can’t believe it will last – but is he right? This cautionary tale of liberal complacency in the face of populist tyranny shows it really can happen here.’

The hero of the book is an editor of a local paper and there are all kinds of echoes about the president’s antipathy to mainstream media – or in the case of 1935, just the media.

The latter half of the book talks about camps – now this was 1935 so no Auschwitz in sight, and anyway, I thought/think that is just not going to happen in this day and age.

Mind you, I had not though a president would defend the Klu Klux Klan.

I thought, for what it is worth, it was not a good idea to bring down the statue of Robert E Lee – you can’t re-write history and as Trump said, who is next? after all Thomas Jefferson was indeed a slave owner.

But then i found out that quite a few of these statues had been put up long after the war, in fact into the 20s, 30, 40s and even 50s – and were more of a reminder to the black population of who was in charge than any commemoration of the time.

And the supremacists were there because for them, the statue was a symbol of what they stand for and that is not equality for all, whatever colour, sex or religion you are.

And, yes, I am sure there were leftist protestors who used violence and would do so again.

I am also sure there are those on the right, who went to that march to campaign for the right to keep the statue who were horrified at the sight of someone driving at full speed into a crowd of opponents.

But there is no excuse or defending of white supremacists, anyone nearing the racist or fascist.

So, here’s the deal:

Poor, white men ( and also some women) feel hard done by because they have lost out and in their view, women, black people, gays have had the attention of the establishment, too much support and have ‘gotten’ an unfair deal.

The point is that white men (poor and otherwise) have had to face attempts to equalise society with others creeping up on their supremacy and they want to revert to the status quo – white men in all shapes and sizes, in charge.

They have faith in a man who says he is working for them and against the liberal establishment and maybe he is.

Liberal complacency on my part? Hands up. I had hoped, even presumed, he would never win and that liberal, progressive views would win through. Easy for me, you might think.

Any change of heart? No. I am a liberal and I want equality for everyone.

A wish to get out of my bubble and listen to other views? Well, I’d like to say yes but really….

and that probably is part of the problem.

Bring Me Your Childrens’ Books

March 7, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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

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

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

So, if you willing to carry on….

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, we did a few of those.

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

It was always an ambitious plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the real surprise was this book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, she saw the notice.

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

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

Another Day in A Life

February 19, 2017February 19, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

For regular readers, and I know there are one or two ( thank you very much), this might be a bit repetitive – more on the life of an ordinary Oxfam bookshop.

And some days it feels a bit like that for me too, but then you have those days when you stumble across all sorts of weird and wonderful books.

So here is what I found at the bottom – it always is at the bottom – of a box:

Well, well, I thought, there is indeed a book out there on any subject in the world you can think of. And, dear reader, thumbing through it was a real eye opener.

Dedicated readers will know of the Petersfield Porn shelf in our shop where we stash all those rather racy books we cannot put out on the shop floor, and we keep for the owner of the second-hand bookshop in the town who buys them in a job lot.

Even more dedicated readers will recall that our book expert wants Petersfield to be the porn hub of Oxfam on the basis that erotica gets thrown out, but some of it is worth a lot of money – so all the other bookshops should send theirs to us. He made this impassioned appeal at a volunteer conference but sadly, none has yet arrived.

And then there was this – handed to me by a fellow volunteer who said, ‘You will put this in a blog I expect.’ So, here it is.

Then there were the several, actually many, boxes of Mills and Boon. I would not say it was the complete oeuvre on the basis that would be so many books, we would be filled to bodice brimming – but certainly there were a lot of them.

We used to send them on to the shop in Cosham which relished – and sold – them but sadly Cosham Oxfam is no more.

They were all in very good condition which suggests they were recently bought and read, and the feminist in me is appalled – but maybe given a spare moment, I might want to know how the seductive miss worked….and where else would you see the word ‘reprobate’ on a book cover?

And then there is this gem. It is a lovely book with all sorts of illustrations and samples of wood to show the cabinet maker what they were working with.

The cover is designed by Talwin Morris who was, according to Wikipedia ‘ a prolific book designer and decorative artist working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly known for his Glasgow Style furniture, metalwork and book designs.’

Finally, I was jus wondering what to do with two donated camping stoves when I came across this little gem and thought there is a box of camping stuff to be started here so should you have any books on camping or caravanning that you have no need of, please drop them off.

I have to say that the ‘cheese a broccoli rolls ‘ did not sound all that appetising….

thereluctanthousewife

life marooned in deepest sussex

Books