Charity Shop Books

I have been charity shopping today and found some real treasures! So often I think of books in charity shops as limited to the Maeve Binchies, Clive Cusslers and Good Housekeepings of this world. I forget that I have got some of my most treasured books second hand and many of them from charity shops.

Once I found The Vogue Sewing Book - a massive doorstep of a book - for the princely sum of £1. I was well chuffed. Another best buy is a Haruki Murakami with the most beautifully illustrated cover. Charity shopping can be so satisfying when you strike gold, like I did today.

I wandered into the British Heart Foundation shop in my local town, looking for clothes I could cut up and resew. Nothing that I particularly liked or would wear even once I'd dismantled it. So I wandered to the back of the shop and looked at the books.

It's a miracle I kept on looking. The first things I was confronted with were diets and loads of strange Christian books that rather freaked me out...but soon I realised that just above my head was a poetry and drama section, bigger even than that in the local Waterstones!! (Waterstones' near me is appalling for poetry and drama). There was everything. Donne. Betjeman. Shakespeare. Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf. Emily Dickinson. Loads more that I can't remember but that had my eyes agog. And some literary fiction among the Maeve Binchies and Clive Cusslers. So many of them were brand new, as well. I couldn't believe it! Beautiful books!!

So I came out with a battered but very lovely Penguin Book of Italian Verse (I speak a bit, but luckily there are translations, and anyway, I just want the rhythms of the language, rather than the meaning if I'm honest), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile by Alice Oswald, as well as book on myths for my mum. All cost me £8. That's £2 a book. The Alice Oswald on its own would have cost £8.99 new. Major bargain!!!

So my tip for today is not to dismiss charity shops! They're getting trendy (and ridiculously priced, yes, I am talking about you Cancer Research) for clothes and things but they are also a potential haven for bookworms!

(And thanks so much Crafty Green Poet for the paragraphing solution!)