From time to time over the past few years I’ve done
volunteer stints a few hours a week selling books
at our local Amnesty International second-hand
bookshop, Books for Amnesty. I live in a university town
in the south of England and the book donations that come
in, sometimes seven or eight in a plastic bag, sometimes a
whole vanful, a house clearance, someone’s whole library,
are endlessly interesting, tend towards the eclectic and are
almost always unexpected repositories of the lives they’ve
been so close to.
Open this copy of Ballerinas of Sadler’s Wells (A. &
C. Black Ltd, 1954) with its still bright-orange-after-sixty-
years cover and its black and white photo of Margot
Fonteyn on the front, its original price of six shillings on
the back (now selling at £2). In blue ink on its first page,
in neat child’s handwriting: Christmas 1954 To Caroline
From Christopher. Tucked in beside this there’s a postcard
of a swaggering tabby cat wearing a collar, and written on
the back of it in an adult hand in faded blue, DARLING
CAROLINE, PLEASE do send me a list of things you
would like to have so that I can have some help to find
YOU a birthday present. I shall be stopping at LIZZIE’S
next week so please tell Nannie that my address will be
Trumpeter’s House. Lots of love xx from Mamma xxxxx
I thought Papa’s present from you lovely.
Or inside The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini
(Allen and Unwin, 1930) a ticket, single, dated 20th July
1936, Chatham and District Traction Company.
Or inside an American first edition of The Buck in the
Snow by Edna St Vincent Millay (Harpers and Brothers,
1928) a business card for Miss Katzenberger’s Piano
Lessons and an address in Queens, New York.
We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus:
cigarette cards with pictures of trees or wildlife; receipts
for the chemist; opera or concert or theatre tickets; rail
or tram or bus tickets from all the decades; photographs
of places and long-gone dogs and cats and holidays; once
even a photo of someone’s Cortina. Now when I donate
books to the shop I have a flick through to make sure that
anything tucked into them isn’t something I might mind
losing.
The volunteers, like the books, are of all ages and all
lifewalks. They all have some things in common; they’re
doing this for nothing, for Amnesty, most of them because
they really love books, many of them because they love the
shop, and all of them because they’re community-minded.
It’s quiet in there, browsy, passers-by getting out of the
rain, regulars who love the place and know that its stock
can be curiously timely—it’s not unusual to hear someone
exclaim out loud at finding just the book she needs or
he’s been looking for all this time—and the occasional
rogue, like the slightly drunk man who chatted to me for
a bit at the cash desk then said, as he left: I was actually
planning on shoplifting from here but since you’re Scottish
I won’t. I called after him as he went out the door: If
you’re going to shoplift don’t do it from a charity shop,
for God’s sake. He gave me a wave and a smile through
the window.
Here are some of the things he could’ve lifted that
day. A Leonard Woolf novel called Sowing, signed inside
Elizabeth from Leonard, Christmas 1962 (the Leonard who
wrote it?). Another Leonard, a biography of Bernstein,
definitely signed by the actual Leonard himself in a sloping
hand. A copy of Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele,
signed and dedicated by Munthe to Lady Astor. A ragged
copy of A Girl Like I by Anita Loos, in which someone
has scrawled in claw-hand on the first page, pArts Of tHis
boOk are VERy sAD.
For every book I donate myself—and this is the problem
with a shop like this—a new-bought old book or two, or
three or four, tend to come home with me. So much for
culling. But what can you do, when you pick up Hunter’s
Guide to Grasses, Clovers and Weeds, 1978 (now £3); flick
through it and find out that there are kinds of grass called
Timothy and Lucerne, that Timothy came from the US in
the 1720s, and Lucerne can’t be hurt by drought because
its roots go so deep? Or 1964’s National Rose Society
Selected List of Varieties (now £2.50); open it at any page
and look what happens: Oberon, Ohlala, Old Pink Moss,
Opera. Ophelia. Optimist, the. The entry after Optimist,
the, simply says: “See Sweet Repose”.
My favourite find so far has been a copy of Lawrence’s
Birds, Beasts and Flowers, not worth much in money terms,
apparently, being a second edition. But open it and on its
first page someone’s stuck a photograph, a young woman
in a bathing suit sitting in long grass by the bank of a river,
looking in a mirror to do her make-up. Above it, in black
ink, in a sweeping hand, F.N.LW. from P.A. Sept. 1933. The
first bit of the book has been well-read. The later pages
are still uncut.
Then there’s the Frescoes from Florence exhibition
catalogue 1969, an Arts Council publication covering the
late 1960s European tour. This book, I’d noticed, comes
in quite regularly. It always sells. When I saw the third or
fourth copy come in I picked it up and leafed through it
at the desk. “As is explained by Professor Procacci in his
introduction, the removal of these frescoes often laid bare
the underdrawing, or sinopia, beneath.” I opened it at a
page where there was a description of a sinopia in which
a woman was holding a small boy by the hand, “later
eliminated by the artist, who painted over that portion”.
The restorers uncovered him, invisible for centuries, and
there all along.