A letter to an Oxfam Bookshop customer

Dear Oxfam Bookshop Customer,

I doubt I’ll ever know your name or face, but I do know that you visited the Oxfam Bookshop in Chichester at some point between Easter and August this year, pulled my book, The Knives of Villalejo, from the shelf in the Poetry section, and decided to buy it. I’m left to imagine you browsing, picking it up and flicking through the pages, perhaps pausing to skim-read a poem or two before taking the plunge, maybe wondered who Camilla might be (the person to whom I dedicated this copy of my book when it began its first stab at life).

I only discovered my collection had gone when I visited the shop last month, checked its old spot, and found it had vanished. It was no longer sitting in its slot under S for Stewart between other books that used to accompany it and are still left waiting to be chosen (see picture below!). 

There’s a thrill to giving a book a new owner, another reader, and I hope you’ve enjoyed your copy. The unanswerable question now, of course, is whether you’ll keep it, go back to it or even let it go again in due course to another charity shop. For now though, I’d simply like to thank you for granting it a second chance.

All the best in a shared love of poetry,

Matthew Stewart

A letter to a reader

Dear Camilla,

Fingers crossed this letter finds you in good health and still enjoying poetry!

I’m afraid I can’t quite remember your face from my reading at the New Park Centre four years ago, though I do just about recall resisting a dodgy joke about the royal family while checking the spelling of your name and signing your brand-new copy of The Knives of Villalejo. However, I’ve been thinking about you a lot these past few days, ever since my friend spotted that very copy at the Oxfam shop in Chichester last week and whizzed a photo of it over to me.

On the one hand, I hope you enjoyed it and then passed it on, rather than regretting your purchase. And then, of course, I hope that you yourself chose to give it to Oxfam. Far too many books in charity shops are from personal libraries that have been dispersed by relatives (see my blog post about Peggy Chapman-Andrews from a few years back).

And on the other hand, I’m writing to thank you for granting me this poetic rite of passage: the first time my book has been spotted at a charity shop. I’m pleasantly surprised not to feel annoyed at all that it might have been discarded. Instead, I’m excited to wonder about the prospective new life it’s been given. As soon as I get back to Chichester, I’ll be popping in to the Oxfam shop to find out whether it’s found another owner.

In other words, I'm proud of joining the ranks of the charity shop poets. I've always loved second-hand books, and my collection's now among them! For that, Camilla, I’ll always be grateful to you.

All the best,

Matthew Stewart

Peggy Chapman-Andrews

I regularly browse the shelves of the poetry section at my local secondhand bookshop in Chichester whenever I’m back in the city, so any new intake always attracts my attention. On having a look this August, however, I realized that I was especially in luck, as a number of terrific books had arrived, all from the same private collection. What’s more, they were all signed and dedicated to their previous owner, and there was even correspondence tucked inside them between the poet in question and the collector.

The books were by winners of the Bridport Prize and they were all dedicated to “Peggy”. The letters were addressed to “The Competition Secretary” and discussed prize-giving ceremonies and winners’ reactions to their awards. After getting home with my haul, I started googling and quickly discovered that these books had come from the personal library of Peggy Chapman-Andrews.

These days, most writers associate Peggy Chapman-Andrews with the first novel award in her name, which is still run by the Bridport Prize. In fact, she almost single-handedly set up the Bridport Arts Centre in 1973 and later, as a fundraising venture, the internationally acclaimed Bridport Prize. Peggy continued to help out as a volunteer even into her nineties until her death in 2013.

I feel an intense sadness that her carefully curated collection of poetry books has been broken up. The correspondence was folded and tucked inside each book with such precision. I suppose it’s inevitable that most such private libraries should end up being dispersed, but this is another example of the ephemeral and passing nature of poetic fame and reputation, as I’ll  explore further in forthcoming posts about specific volumes from Peggy Chapman-Andrews’ collection.

At least these books have found a loving home. I treasure their texts and the story behind their journey into my hands. Thank you, Peggy.

The journeys of secondhand books

I've written about the lives of secondhand books on several occasions on Rogue Strands. They never cease to bring surprises.

The latest case was a beat-up Penguin copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I purchased it at St Wilfred's Hospice Shop in Chichester and brought it back out to Spain. On opening the book last week, I noticed a sheet of glossy paper slipping out and falling to the floor: it was an advert for a bullfight in Mijas back in the 1980s.

How many hands have held this book? How many lives has it touched? How many journeys has it made? Will it ever make another one...?

The lives of second hand books

I love the idea of the different lives that are led by books. Just we gain fresh perspectives from them, so our treatment of them casts fresh light on us. In fact, one of my poems from Inventing Truth, titled Last Chance, is a first-person monologue from the point of view of a second hand book at a jumble sale as it awaits a new owner or the fate of being recycled.

In a similar vein, some months ago I highlighted Wayne Gooderham's excellent Guardian feature about bespoke dedications that can be found in second hand books. Well, since then he's started a blog here for his collection of them. It's well worth a look...I can feel another poem coming on!

Secondhand books

There's an excellent article by Wayne Gooderman up at the Guardian Books Blog at the moment, titled "The secret stories of book inscriptions".

I've always preferred secondhand books to new ones. The pages have a lived-in feel, while hints of previous existences often appear in them, such as train tickets or postcards, once used as bookmarks, enabling the imagination to speculate.

However, as Gooderman's article points out, the most intriguing aspect of secondhand books is often the bespoke dedications that we encounter in them, leading us towards stories beyond those told by the texts that follow. I personally find the dedications from grandparents to grandchildren the most poignant ones when I'm searching in charity shops for books for my son. These discards of adolescence are charged with the concentrated expression of love by elderly people. I invariably buy them because books, like people, deserve a second shot at love.