There will indeed be an update on the map and coins as promised but for now, something which happens, if not every day, then often enough to be one of the main reasons I volunteer in the bookshop.
So, you arrive in one morning and find boxes stacked high of donations and you glance at them to see enough damp, dated, battered, unsaleable, books to make your heart sink.
And you come across one which seems to fit that bill.
But then you open it and it is a book of oddities and delights – and must have some stories to tell but I can’t tell them for you.
Here it is.
Dated art books are not often very valuable but this one may have interest.
Let’s start with the bookplate.
Desmond Young was not, having read his obituary, the kind of man you would have thought bought art books.
Still, he clearly owned this one and his bookplate seems to show a devoted sailor returning to his loving wife after long journeys afar.
Maybe this is his (later) widow, and how he thought of them both.
And then there are the two sheets of receipts which have nothing at all to do with art or the book.
They are about furnishings being imported (see the import stamps) presumably for his house, in Le Beaupre, Sark..
I thought I would have a look at what his house looked like.
I put in the postcode and I searched Google street view but they had nothing. I looked up the address and history and found not much.
Now this was a quick fizz of a search so if you are more interested, here is the postcode: GY10 1SH.
Meanwhile Desmond Young ( or maybe his wife) was ordering a large comfortable velour sofa, a two metre grey rug, and some 7 metres of legarde ordinaire from Charles Mellon-Charrier ‘upholsterer to her majesty, by special appointment.’
This is dated 1924 so we are talking, apparently, Mary of Teck (Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, wife of George V.)
And we haven’t got to the book yet.
Just to be a bit technical: it is foxed which means it has brown spots on some pages, despite the spine coming apart, it is tightly bound which means the pages are all holding together, the plates (pictures, and we will be coming to those) are attached one side only, each plate is numbered and there is an index showing XXVI (26) coloured plates and 15 black and white plates.
Bet you never needed to know that much about what has to be written up when you put a book to be sold online.
Each plate has a short description of why it is good and Charles Marriott has some pages to explain his stuff.
Now here will be a some of those plates.
I have to say, being no expert, I have never heard of half these artists, with my Antiques Roadshow addiction.
But I think they are pretty damned impressive and I am betting that someone will buy the book to take out the plates and frame them and if it doesn’t sell, I will bring it home and ask the BB to do just that.
‘What?’ I hear someone cry, ‘ how can you rip a book apart?’
Well, here is why.
If it doesn’t sell our option is to send it off to be re-cycled. I would rather rip it apart and make pictures which we can sell and get some money for someone who needs food, water, housing, education.
But of course, of course, I would rather sell it to someone who will treasure it and its history.
But if and when it sells on Oxfam Online, who knows what the buyer will do with it……
thereluctanthousewife 