Realising why we have so many books – and what we can do about it

Posted by louisa on Monday 20 September 2010 in decluttering | 2 comments

(Apologies if this is stating the bleedin’ obvious but it was a revelation to us! ;) )

Our rather nomadic friend Dan popped by our house on Saturday to meet the dog and the chickens and say a passing hello to us before he moves on again. Between various post-grad studies, jobs and that crazy little thing called love, Dan’s moved around a lot over the last few years and he revealed that ahead of/during his moves, he’s pared down his book collection considerably, from about 500 tomes to just 100. Since we’re book-y people (we met on an English Literature course) to get rid of that many is quite an achievement.

Even with my new anti-hoarding policy (of giving away a book for every two new-to-me books I buy), I still find it difficult to give books away – but it was only while talking to Dan that I realised why. Most of the time, I don’t have any particular attachment to the physical books but I have great affection for the stories contained within. And a considerable amount of the time, I have no desire to read the story again any time soon, I just don’t want to forget it exists — seeing the spine on my shelves reminds me of the story and often reminds me of the time of my life when I read it etc. The example we both used were Ben Elton’s early novels – the environmental ones, Gridlock, Stark and This Other Eden. Not exactly literary masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, not books I’ve read in the last decade and not books I see myself reading in the next five years or more – but I remember finding them interesting as a teenager and still think about some of the ideas regularly to this day. It was the first time I’d really consciously realised the current purpose of a considerable part of my book collection (and to a lesser extent, our media collection too).

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Bargain books and photo frames

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 31 August 2010 in charity shopping, frugal | 0 comments

Hope everyone had a lovely long weekend – we continued our fun/unfun activities from earlier in the week: blackberrying in the gentle rain (and then having to give up half my harvest to horses, to get them to let us out of their field) & relaxing on Saturday, 10 hours of decorating at the old house on Sunday, then our normal Sunday chores/lazing on Monday.

I made a few bargainacious purchases. First up, two books from a charity shop in Shipley:

Since my September will include both a first time fishing experience and a stretching of my limited woodworking skills (I want to make more planters and maybe a bench), these finds were both well timed. There were a number of similar fishing encyclopaedias available but this one, for £2, looked about the best. I suspect I can find a lot of this information online but I like browsing through books as an introduction to the subject.

At £5, the woodworking book was a little more expensive than I’d usually spend on a book at a charity shop but aside from the glue smear on the front, it looks brand new and has an RRP of £30 (Amazon has it for just under £18). Again, I could have found a lot of the information online for free but I’d much rather take a book outside for reference while working on something than my laptop.

Finally, while buying sugar soap & scrapers from Wilkinsons on Sunday, I spotted some basic clip frames on their super-sale shelves.

I really like the idea of having a lot of photos up on a wall but nice wooden frames are so expensive when you’re thinking about buying 20 or 30 at a time. Clipframes are obviously a lot not quite as pretty but far cheaper – these were frightening cheap to start with (at 60p for three) but in the clearance bay, disturbingly cheap at 10p for a pack of three. I bought all ten packs on clearance – 30 clip frames for £1. Now to fill them with some free prints…

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Charity shop finds: two fruitbowls and a vintage cookbook

Posted by louisa on Monday 26 July 2010 in charity shopping | 0 comments

Another Saturday afternoon charity shopping in Shipley – and another few select purchases.

It was, stangely, an afternoon for buying wooden fruit bowls. The first one – the bottom one – was £2.50 from Scope, the second (and to be honest, nicer) one was £2.40 from BHF. As soon as I got back to John, he said “but we have a fruit bowl. And we don’t eat fruit” – which is largely true but I’d imagined using them as general storage bowls not fruit bowls, per se.

I also got a vintage cookbook from the crazy randomness that is the JOY shop. The book is apparently a spin-off from a Yorkshire TV cooking show in the 1970s and when I flicked through it in the shop, the first two recipes I saw were for candied ginger marrow and marrow & tomato chutney. Since I’m looking for different marrow recipes at the moment, I thought “ace! many marrow recipes!” and happily handed over my 50p. Turns out those are the only two marrow recipes in it. Ah well. There are some other interesting preserve recipes in it – and a section on homebrewing/fruit wine making too.

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