An embarrassment of riches in the basement (From Oxford Mail)

An embarrassment of riches in the basement

8:52am Wednesday 17th December 2008

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There was an embarrassment of riches the other day when I descended into the basement of the Oxfam bookshop in St Giles to put a price on some old donations.

Abebooks proved a reliable guide in most cases, and a steady stream of interesting volumes kept coming my way.

A 1934 copy of Poems by WH Auden, his first regularly published book of poems, I priced at a rather steep £19.99, despite a small tear in the spine, but comparable editions were fetching similar amounts on the net.

I then pencilled in a price of £9.99 for a 1936 first edition of The Ascent of F6, the drama Auden wrote with Christopher Isherwood. With a dust jacket, a price tag of more than £70 would have been fair but, alas, it didn't have one.

Other good stuff included Samuel Pepys: Lover of Music, a small 1903 edition published by Smith, Elder & Co. It was quite collectable, and the going rate was about £40.

Perhaps my favouite find of the day was a stack of volumes by Cotswolds expert HJ Massingham.

Careful scrutiny of the flyleaf of the 1933 Cobden edition of Massingham's London scene revealed his initials and a brief pencilled note to a friend.

I wasn't sure how much the signature would add to the guide price, so I have asked for a second opinion.

You will be glad to hear that I finally managed to relieve Blackwell's of the Kipling biography which the store temporarily mislaid after I put the volume to one side.

After picking up the book from customer services, I legged it upstairs to the second-hand section and found a few more treasures.

I nabbed a couple of Beezer annuals for a couple of quid for the lads this Christmas and a smart Heinemann 1950s copy of Boswell's grand tour of Switzerland and Germany in 1764.

A hardback edition of Bevis Hillier's Betjeman: A Life in Pictures was very tempting at £7.50, but I didn't want to blow all my lunch money so I beat a hasty retreat before popping into The Buttery in Broad Street for one of the best cornish pasties in Oxford.

From my own library, I am currently enjoying The Shipping News by Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Proulx, The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre, and a number of volumes by Christian writer Philip Yancey, including one which is called Finding God in Unexpected Places.

Yancey is a journalist, so I'm hoping he is going to tell it to me straight and, so far, he is.