Everyone loves a mystery

It's exactly four and a half years since I opened the bookshop. During that time I have acquired, cleaned, opened, repaired, browsed, read, occasionally discarded, valued, priced and sold a lot of books. Quite often there will be something inside a book, left there by a previous owner, sometimes intentionally but sometimes unintentionally.

I have kept each and every item in a bag and today I realised the bag was full and so for the first time I emptied out its entire contents...

Bookmarks, plane tickets, newspaper cuttings, business cards, headed paper, compliment slips, pressed flowers, love-letters, feathers, menus, passport photos, rail tickets, the remains of dust-jackets, dead spiders, old black and white photographs of entire families, holiday snaps, handwritten notes and phone numbers, elaborate sketches, birthday cards, Trade Union letters, theatre tickets, First Day Covers, Football Pools coupons, calendars, postage stamps, booklets, identity cards, other bookshops' literature, thank-you notes, subscription renewal notices, a £75 gift voucher for a local shop (sadly long expired), postcards, obituary notices, various invoices, invitations, World Book Day tokens, lottery tickets (no, I have't checked them - they're over six months old), very neatly folded up paper bags, photographic negatives, to name but a few.

Individually there's nothing of great value (although it's always possible that one of the lottery tickets was once worth a few million). Every name, address, face, etc, is unknown to me but every single item surely has a story behind it. I may blip some of them in the future so watch this space....