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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Most of you peeps will be aware of Charity Shops or 'Thrift Stores' to our trans-Atlantic cousins...
(Aside) While we discussing linguistic differences: Dear America, The letter 'U' appears in a lot of words and doesn't cost you any extra, so why take it out? And is the 'z' sound of the letter 'S' so difficult to understand that you have to 'Zee' it instead? Hmmmmmmmmmm? Cntz*
Anyway (lovely coffee), as I was saying...
Our little country town of Newent is blessed with a trio of volunteer-manned, purely-for-the-benefit-of-the-needy secondhand goods stores; a Holy triumverate wellspring of books, games, clothes,toys and china. For such a small settlement, the shops are surprisingly vigorous in their turn-over of stock and barely a week goes by without me browsing for some interesting tidbits.
For some reason, Newent (in the Forest of Dean - you know, not far from where Harry and Hermione holed up for a while) has a hidden community of 60s and 70s games players who - probably due to expiration, or permanent resettlement to an Old Folks Home (aka Living Hell) are having their collections drip-fed into the Thrift stores of the County!
Not that I'm complaining! For the price of a bottled cola I have, in recent years, picked up VERY tidy copies of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Hoity Toity (yes, the German version), Stockbroker, Scoop: The Newspaper Game!, Judge Dredd, RuneQuest (2nd Edition) (boxed with all the leaflets and gubbins), Escape from Colditz and many, many more. Yesterday, I popped in to look at the childrens books for my youngest (Arthur) and came out with two lavishly-illustrated coffee table books about Train and London Underground poster art and a tidy copy of Talisman (2nd Ed) sans rulebook!
There is a slight moral dilemma, of course: paying such a stupidly-low amount of money for games that have a (much) greater value - at least if you can find the right buyer! I resolve this in my own mind by the fact that I never get rid of this stuff (well, apart from the Runequest box that got be 35 quid) - they lie, un-played and neatly stacked in my capacious outbuilding. I'm not a shop, just a hoarder...in the grand tradition of these things, I hope that one day I will be able to reuse components or, perhaps, 'borrow' a neat mechanic from these dusty friends in a new work. Plus they just look so damn cool: the art, the cheesy tag-lines and the overall sense of history they represent.
Perhaps I should write a detailed history? The authoritative tome of such hobbyist matters?
I do have a copy of a fantastic reference work on Victorian and Georgian Board Games by F.R.B Whitehouse - a 1st Edition (1951) I picked up for a proper price in a secondhand bookshop. It's a loving slip-cased, hard-bound catalogue detailing linen-printed, beautifully illustrated, 'educational' board games from the 18th and 19th centuries. I also picked up a copy of the 2nd Edition (1971) from an Oxfam bookshop in Central London a few years later which turned out to be the copy F.R.B Whitehouse, himself, donated to the House of Commons Library(!). A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to pick up an original example of one of these games at Essen Spiel from the delightful chaps at Glenwood Games (they deal in the rare stuff, the REALLY rare and beautiful stuff):
Ah, but I'm rambling. What's the best item YOU'VE discovered in a Charity shop? Was it easy prising it from the cold fingers of the Octogenarian 'volunteer' - cup of weak tea in one hand, curare-tipped brolley in the other?
*Please don't take offence - this is just a ridiculous build up to crack a stupid little joke; you know I love you guys really (smooch)
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