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.
thereluctanthousewife 