Design

Oxfam Trials, Tribulations and Surprises

/ 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……)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Very Good Day

/ aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that makes it rare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, finally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he did – how amazing is that….?

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

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

A good day or what?

Blue Trousers

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‘By the way, it’s a black tie event,’ said my best beloved as he headed off to somewhere in Bulgaria leaving me with a very busy week – and nothing appropriate to wear.

I had just sold on eBay the only dress I had which could have passed muster at a black tie event and now had three days before the event and really no time to go shopping.

As you may recall, dear reader, I am a dedicated charity shopper and the thought of paying money for a posh new frock I would not have just cause to wear for the next ten years, seemed just silly.

But one of the first rules of charity shopping is that you cannot go looking for something specific, in your size, in your style, and available on that day – it just doesn’t work like that.

But, optimist that I am, I thought I would find something.

As I mentioned, I did not have a lot of time – book sorting, dog walking, refugee good cause meetings etc etc take up time, even for a Sussex Housewife.

So, I raced around the charity shops of Petersfield and took stock, as it were.

That looked nice, but not on me. That was nice too, but sadly wouldn’t go over my shoulders or pulled the other way, past my bum. That was a nice colour, but that was all that was nice about it. That looked like something my gran would have thought nice. And so on.

In the end I went back to my wardrobe and rootled out a rather lovely garment that I had worn for a friend’s wedding evening do.

It is a bright green turquoise with yellow embroidery – bear with me, dear reader, it is striking, but not garish. It is long and has what we used to call, in my youth, a Mandarin collar – do they still call it that?

Anyway, it is long with buttons from throat to nearly the floor but it also had slits up the side from nearly the floor to nearly the hips. I am not Elizabeth Hurley.

On the previous occasion, I had worn it with jeans and rather liked that jeans-with-posh look but even I know that jeans at a black tie occasion at an Oxford College celebrating its bicentennial was probably a step too outrageous for me to carry off.

Never mind, I thought, as a speed-dash around the charity shops again failed to provide me with navy skinny trousers, we can get to Oxford in good time and I will find something there.

I guess you have an inkling where this is heading.

I could not find navy skinny trousers in Oxford for love nor money.

Well actually, in panic, I did find them, for (a lot of) money.

Suffice it to say, L K Bennett, not even in a sale.

And they are glorified leggings.

( Very, very good leggings and a delight to wear but even so, dear god, what a price shock to the person not used to paying more than £5.50 for a good-label item.

I am now wearing them at every possible opportunity. There’s that thing that if you wear them more often then each wear has cost you less, and eventually they feel like a bargain – I am not, dear reader, at that stage yet.)

That night, I put them on and my striking Mandarin collared ‘dress’ and went down to the pre-dinner drinks.

I did a head count to find fewer than ten other women in the room and not one was wearing anything different than you would wear to an office meeting with your immediate boss. I have dresses like that!

Was I gutted? well yes and no. I did feel the best dressed woman there – and though was wearing bloody expensive posh leggings I needn’t have bought, I also had a very stylish charity shop find on too  – and I will bet no one else in that room could have said that.

IKEA & The Empire

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I remember a time when I said I would never set foot in IKEA again – but of course, I have.

I said it because I was fed up with being seduced by cheap prices and buying stuff, more stuff & stuff we didn’t need and me, a second-hand shopper wants good, old stuff.

On the other hand, it is Scandinavian design and I am a sucker for that, but then again I would rather be shopping in Stockholm than Southampton.

(Shopping in Stockholm does require a more than modest lottery win, I need to say.)

So, we had a list of things we needed to get from IKEA including large mats to replace those we had bought several years ago and on which we could now could fondly trace the red wine spill, the casserole slip and various dog issues, as well as general grime.

To get me through this ordeal, I decided to think of it as I imagined some 19th century Empire-bound wife would as she planned setting up home in the tea plantations of Northern India or in the nice suburbs of Calcutta.

She would have been shopping in the Army & Navy stores – set up in 1871
to supply goods and chattels to army and navy ( not surprisingly) officers, and to supply them cheaply.

There was a stationery department ( always a favourite with me), a drapery department, fancy goods department ( I am not sure what was in that, but I do wonder what fancy goods you might need on an Empire posting), handily they also had a gun department (and as fancy goods go, a gun might work.)

They don’t have such departments in IKEA.

In 1890, The Army & Navy opened new stores in Plymouth and Mumbai. For all I know IKEA have stores in Plymouth and Mumbai, but it’s just not the same.

My best beloved has a dinner service which he bought from the Army & Navy before his first posting to Baghdad. The Foreign Office let you do things like that in those days so that you had decent, British, upstanding plates on which to serve food to grateful natives no doubt. ( We still use it – for less grateful Sussex natives.)

So from a store where you could buy supplies to take with you when you set off to bring civilisation and British values to the locals, the Army & Navy developed into a mail order service.

They had a massive catalogue which included everything from bars of soap to wedding dresses – both, no doubt, terribly useful in their own ways.

IKEA has lots of useful things too.

So, we bought a light fitting, had a long debate about toilet brushes, as you do, some cups of exactly the right shape for Nick – he is a man of habit and these cups are the exact right shape and he’s not to be deflected with other shaped cups.

It was relatively painless – and we did get some good large mats.

There was a mattress topper which we have to order online and that is fine, that is today’s world.

But there is a bit of me, sitting on the veranda on a hillside in India looking through the Army & Navy catalogue and being delighted that they can deliver a kitchen range and linoleum ‘within 40 and 17 days respectively.’