HERE’S a book sale with a difference as these historic tomes will set you back a pretty penny for a good cause.

Staff at the Oxfam Book Shop in Cornmarket, Thame, hope to raise £10,000 in two weeks with a sale of rare items.

Buyers can get 50 to 60 per cent off the books, worth a total £20,000 in its first January sale which started on Saturday and runs to January 10.

They include a world atlas folio from 1835 by engraver John Crane Dower valued at £1,200, going for £500. Much of Africa is blank because it had not been mapped at that stage.

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Already gone is a 1882 edition of Jane Austen’s works, down from £600 to £300.

Also on offer is a signed copy of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach for £90, down from £150.

Shop manager Dick Jennens said: “Some of the books we’ve had on our shelves for about two years. We have some incredible items but the issue is finding the right buyer.

“We get a lot of good quality books coming through our doors as Thame is quietly affluent and a lot of people are well educated.

“We have sold a lot of valuable books. One of the most expensive was a first edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which we sold for £995.”

The bookshop reached a milestone in fundraising in 2010 after making £1m in its first 10 years by selling almost 500,000 books.

The married grandfather-of-four said the fundraising done by Oxfam this year was more important than ever.

He added: “In the 14 years I’ve worked for Oxfam, this is the busiest year for fundraising that I can remember. At the beginning of the year we had the Tsunami in the Philippines, then we had the civil war in South Sudan, the crisis in Iraq, fighting in Syria and now we have the Ebola crisis.

“For a lot of people their world will be turned upside down this Christmas.”

The shop is well versed in handling rare items. It brokered the sale of a folio of correspondence to an Oxfordshire resident that included a letter on education reform by Charles Dickens.

It was bought by a relative of former journalist and controversial TV personality Malcolm Muggeridge. The shop received 50 per cent of the sale price of £11,500.



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