Brilliant book.  Old diet books can often be depressing, especially second hand ones with teeth marks in the margins and doodles of cupcakes in every blank space.  They’re often accompanied by books about sumptuous French cuisine and Port, with the owner offering both up to charity presumably in order to give up food altogether.

This was a corker – clearly the author had neatly cornered the market in middle aged men who were willing to try anything – absolutely  anything -  to lose weight, as long as it wouldn’t interfere with their drinking.  The author offers early reassurance on the inside cover:

“Did you ever hear of a diet that was fun to follow? A diet which would let you have two martinis before lunch, a thick steak generously spread with Sauce Bearnaise,[...] A diet which allows you to take your favourite girl for a dinner of pheasant and broccoli, with Hollandaise Sauce and Chateau Lafite, to be followed by an evening of rapture and champagne?”  Ding dong!

You can almost hear the conversation in the London club which surely inspired the author:

Gentleman 1: “No thirds for me thanks chap – I’m trying to shed a few pounds”.

Gentleman 2: “Dangerous business this dieting, old bean.  Hope you’re not going to let it put you off the sauce.  Knew a chap once who started trying to ease back – stopped having a second martini at lunch, that sort of thing.  He wasted away to nothing in a matter of weeks.”

Gentleman 1: “How ghastly.  No, I certainly won’t let it affect my drinking.  Trouble is, how does a man about town such as myself set about getting into shape without compromising on rapture and champagne.”

Gentleman 2: “I don’t know George, but just remember – you are a Drinking Man, first and foremost”.

Perhaps there are a series – “The Smoking Man’s Workout”; “The Gambling Man’s Savings”?

Just one more big sale and that Quattro is mine!

These old books about business are great.  All offices should have to have an enlarged version of this cover on the wall; a sage reminder that we cannot escape our times, and that all of our technology, our clothes, our haircuts and our jokes will soon look about as cool and desirable as hepatitis.

I mean just look at that hair.  And dude – a pink phone?  Was this an interim measure before society accepted homosexuality?”  Well I still think what they do is disgusting, but I do have a pink phone.” Or perhaps there was a more sinister motive, in times of widespread misconceptions about HIV transmission – “And this is the phone I use when I’m talking to gay people – it has a special antiseptic filter on the earpiece so I don’t catch You Know What“.

This cover caught my eye because of the expression of the guy standing up.  Clearly smug-arse Mergers and Acquisitions man Jenkins has just called his secretly gay boss (on the normal phone) to boast about how massive his quarterly output is.  Look at him unfolding that old computer paper like a giant phallus on the desk.  Trouble is, there’s a problem.  Secretly gay boss in the grey suit is lifting up his glasses in abject horror – having spotted that Jenkins has gone and forgotten to build in the costs associated with opening the Reading office.  The twat.   Jenkins isn’t going to be getting that remote controlled garage now is he.

The title’s a bit interesting too – sort of patronising and presumptuous at the same time,  as though there were thousands of law firms out there but none of them had yet struck upon the idea of maximising their profits.  Perhaps they had discussions at the Bar Association about it -  “Who’s this wildcat – isn’t the satisfaction of winning a case enough for him?”;  “I know, hell – I didn’t become a lawyer to make money!”.  “Too right – and there’s one of those new gay phones on the cover”…

I wonder if there are other titles in the same series – “Maximising the Desirability of your Wife”?; “Maximising the Intactness of your Limbs”; “Maximising the Impact of Gravity on Your Possessions”?

I did look for the bit inside that said: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the profits…” but there wasn’t one.  Shame.

Note the title – not content with one volume of captioned obscenities, and due to the overwhelming clamour for further insight into the foul mouths of domestic animals, the (two) authors have bowed to pressure and sweated out that difficult second album.  Not having the first volume to hand, I am unable to gauge the extent to which the narrative thread has maintained consistency, or whether the pets in question have achieved greater  fulfilment in the meantime.  But here are a few samples…

The exact breakdown of the two authors’ responsibilities isn’t made clear.  Perhaps Lepine photographs the animals while Mike Leigh, wracked and wan with the effort, comes up with the captions.  The original would have cost you £5.99, but this is after all a charity shop, and in light of that I priced this copy at £19.99.

Mmm...can you taste the aspiration?

1985 , British suburbia.  It’s time to impress the neighbours, and the new Audi Quattro just isn’t cutting it anymore.  There’s only one thing to do – buy some massive shoulder pads,  get a fabulous hair-do and host the shit out of them.

Prawn cocktail?  You betcha; but you need to take it to the next level.  You need Jellied Tomato Cocktail, Saddle of Hare, Venison Stroganoff, and some East Frisian Pears and Charlotte Cream for dessert.   This is rich, complex food which is going to require a considerable investment of time and your husband’s money.  Only through the exquisite drizzling of anchovy essence and the careful spooning of caraway seeds can you be assured of social elevation.   The route  is strewn with collapsed souffle, unsatisfactory glazing and corked wine.   But what glory awaits the happy victor; what untold delights of sophistication, recognition, class, status.  With our pastry we will conquer!

Old cookery books are always fascinating; they’re an unknowing commentary on British society.  From the rich, showy food in the book above, to the unbelievably complex and laborious recipes found in other weighty tomes from the 70s and 80s, they say much about the habits and desires of the nation.  The concept of ‘food porn’ emerges, as above in the 80s, with the advent of easy printing of colour photographs in books.  90s and 00s books fall into two distinct categories.  There’s the evolved  ‘food porn’ school, with Nigella Lawson as its helmswoman.

Tasty...

Quite.  Here the emphasis remains on complex, decadent  food which is designed to impress your peers and show off your full set of Le Creuset.  Domestic-Goddessdom is as much the object as culinary aptitude.  In the other category are books which reflect the massive reduction in the time most people have available for cooking these days.  3 step recipes, 2 step recipes, simple ingredients, microwaves, fried rice, anything to reduce that crucial time between getting home after a long day at the office, and sitting down behind a plate of something revitalising.   No fuss, no glamour, no wait.

Who knows what cookery books from 20 years’ time will look like.  Maybe someone will actually have invented that special chewing gum from ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ by then.

We can put little chips in their brains....

Iron no more sisters!  For it’s 1984 and the computer age is upon us, with a world of possibilities from BASIC programming to simple line drawings and the possibility of  saving to floppy disk!

I love these old books about computers – we get them all the time.  There’s something endearing about their diligent explanations of long forgotten programming languages, and long chapters weighing up the various merits of daisy wheel and dot matrix printing, and explaining that, for about £4,000, you could get a really good home computing suite.  “No – no” you want to shout – “wait a while – you’ll look like a proper dick in a few years when you’re still paying off the loan and your neighbours trot round with a Macbook Pro.” But alas they hear not our shouts through the pages.  Often, the final chapter contains a stern warning from the author about the dangers of computers one day taking over the world.  It makes me sad to smell their musty covers and toss them into the recycling sack – for like butterflies these books have only the shortest of marketable lifespans.  So much effort over something so obsolete – but which surely paved the way for all that followed.

This example took an unusual line, blending early home computing with neo-feminism.  The great advantage of computers, Deakin argues,  is that they can be used in the home – allowing guilt free and gainful employment via data entry and typing.  Searchable databases are also within reach.  A whole generation of women could grow up with new skills and confidence to match.  And she would be their shepherd, cutting through the male jargon of microchips and circuitry to a promised land of superior technical knowledge and the power to lead a new revolution in the home and workplace alike.

Poor Ms Deakin – how was she to know that the ‘Golden Opportunity’ blending women and computing would turn out to be less to do with emancipation, but rather the widespread and free availability of hardcore pornography?

A very fine woman -  slim and dressed in the very latest skinny leggings and bubble skirt, with expensively styled hair, dyed grey.  She could have been any age between 20 and 40 and was emaculately turned out in that faintly casual, upper class way.   She carried a large bag and seemed to flow from shelf to shelf like butter, standing gracefully with on hand on her hip and the other browsing, I supposed,  a learned looking french tome here, some philosophy there.  I looked on fondly, what class, what style – why can’t all our customers be cast in this mould of fragile elegance?

Then she opened her mouth.  “Can I look at one these?” she said, in a child-like soprano,  pointing to a display cabinet of quite expensive comic yearbooks, from the 1950s and 60s.  I obliged.  She peroused the volume and began flicking through it pensively – it was ‘Blackie’s Girls’ Annual’ , from about 1955.  She seemed to be concentrating very hard, and didn’t say anything for about two minutes.

“I like the covers of these.  They’re quite pretty aren’t they?” she uttered, demurely.

“Yes”, said I.

“Are they, sort of, comic books?”

“Yes, they’re comic yearbooks from the 1950s”.

“Marvellous.  I like the covers” she said again.

“Some of them have stories in as well”  I said, trying to be helpful.

“Do they?” she said, wide-eyed. “Brilliant”.

She flicked through one or two others in the same, fascinated way.

“I’ll take this one” she said at last, holding up with enthusiasm the volume which had first caught her eye.   “I think the cover is so…”

“Pretty.  Yes, istn’ it”.

We went to the till.   She fumbled in her large bag for her purse.  It was at this point that I noticed, for the first time, her hands.  They were quite incredibly bejewelled.  A truly enormous diamond wedding ring, with several other very, very fine rings and bangles.  Here was no mere Chelsea daddy’s girl – this was serious, oligarchical, yacht owning affluence.  I wonder now if she might have been a celebrity – I have a history of not recognising famous people,  having had conversations with both Simon Callow and JK from Jamiroquai, without ever realising who they were until later.

“Is a £50 ok?” she said, a verbal confirmation of her wealth, were any needed.  There are three types of people who use £50 notes.  American tourists, forgers, and the ridiculously wealthy.  You don’t get given them unless you withdraw the kind of amounts which require you to go into one of those little private rooms at the bank.

“I’m afraid we don’t accept £50 notes”, [too many forgeries]  I said, apologetically.  We do take cards though – if that’s any help?”

The statuesque beauty looked troubled; her expression was like that which might have appeared had I asked her to pay in livestock.

“Oh, no, sorry” she said, biting her lip and looking around her, as though expecting someone to appear at her side.  She sucked her teeth and looked pained.

Her brow cleared suddenly.  “I know – I’ll go and get a £20 note instead” she said, brightly.

With that she padded happily out of the shop.  Whether she went to a cashpoint, the glove-compartment of her Ferrari, or to her husband, will remain forever a mystery, but in any event she duly returned some moments later.  As well as getting some cash, she had clearly realised she was in need of fortification, and carried with her two carrier bags packed with cans of coke, crisps, and other snacks.  Evidently she was anticipating no swift conclusion of her business here.

She approached the till again, and began rooting through her pockets and her bag.  Every pocket seemed to be liberally adorned with £50 notes, and for a few moments they flowed like hankies from her sleeves.  After some time, she produced the promised £20 note, and presented it apologetically.

“I’m sorry about this.  Do you have change?” she said.

“Yes, of course”

“Oh, but I should really give you a £10 shouldn’t I?”  she said, regrettfully.

“No No,  a £20 is fine…there’s plenty of change” I said quickly – wondering how I had conveyed the impression that her £20 note was a wholly unacceptable means of paying for something which cost a mere £8.50. But it was too late, her mind was made up.

More rooting around followed.  She put her bag on the floor and searched more intently, performing a delicate courtsy as she lowered herself.

“I’m sorry about this” she kept saying, clearly troubled by the experience and fearing the opprobium of her fellow shoppers, most of whom had now realised that I was in for the long haul and wisely decided to return another day.  Another whirlwind of cash, diamonds and snacks ensued.

The sought after £10 finally emerged, and I am happy to report that the remainder of the transaction was conducted quickly and without further incident.

She left with her yearbook tucked gladly under her arm, and with a promise to return the following week, when, I told her, we would have a window display of the large donation of similar books we had received.   I know for a fact that a number of them have both pretty covers and stories inside, and for that reason am confident that the recent downward trend in weekend sales can be abruptly reversed.

WJAKWHATASHITCOVERFORABOOKAFALSKJ

“You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”,  the saying goes…”unless it’s really shit”.  Covers either have to be really good or really bad to stand out in a crowd of 10,000 or so.  And boy, did this stand out.  Most books you can instantly categorise using some combination of their title, cover illustration, author, and whether or not they have pop-up shapes.   This on the other hand, was a mystery.  Was it a language textbook?  A latin primer?  A book about linguistics?  Was it even in English?  All was a mystery – and of course it’s cheating to look at the back cover.

In the end of course, I broke and looked at the back cover.  It noted that the book was called Libidan – “the first black comedy of the biotechnological age”  (oh how we’ve waited).   Its author, PJ Goddard, is described as a “Renaissance Man…from a celebrated family of academics and intellectuals” .  He also speaks Japanese and is an accomplished composer, apparently.  All of which adds up to a man who, frankly, should have known better than to have a cover consisting almost entirely of jumbled up Gs, Ts, Cs, and As.   It doesn’t help that the title is a made up word.  It could equally be ‘Libidang’ (an Australian rodent?), ‘Calibidang’ (A fizzy, Tango like drink?) or even ‘Gaccalibidang’ (a Ned Flandersism?) – you’d never guess.  The hell does ‘Libidan’ mean anyway?

I couldn’t even be bothered to pull out any of the pretentious quotes which surely lie within; the tortuous metaphors, the over-thought plot, the pedantic attention to meaningless detail.   I’m sure it’s very clever, very groundbreaking, and deeply influential on those who plough through its pages of long words.  But I’m equally sure that a lot of people will put it down because of the rubbish cover, and the fact that its author feels the need to cite his breeding and musical ability on the back cover in order to try and sell it.  It’s not like people browse bookshops thinking  “Yes, it may be a good read, but it says here the author’s only got Grade 3 on the viola”.  Or maybe they do; maybe that’s the whole point.

There are a lot of books about dreams out there, but this is a particular gem I spied the other day.  Most of these books – which we file under that all encompassing topic ‘Leisure’ – at least make some attempt to ground their claims in science, or at the very least, reality. Much is invested in glossy covers and pictures of men wearing cheap suits and Evangelical smiles, the better to show off their dubious qualifications.   No such approach here – the book simply presents an A-Z of the meanings of every dream you could ever have, without a word of explanation as to how, or indeed by whom, the interpretations have been, er, dreamt up.

What’s most interesting is how specific many of the interpretations are:

‘To dream of eating macaroni denotes small losses’. Does it? Even if you had just spent all week working in an Italian Restaurant, before spending your weekend in attendance of the 4th Annual Macaroni Producers’ Symposium, where you eat nothing but Macaroni for 2 days solid and then, on Sunday night, came home and watched a 3 hour long documentary about Macaroni before retiring for a well earned rest in your Maraconi adorned bedroom?

But that’s a very broad brushstroke by the standards of this book; here’s a more specific reading:

‘If you dream of playing ten-pin bowling, you may soon engage in some affair which will bring discredit upon your name, and lose you money and true friendship.’ Yeah, like bowling, maybe, if anyone sees you at that Megabowl on the ring-road.

Not a word of explanation, just interpretations, recorded as though handed down from Moses (probably during a dream).  Perhaps I’m doing the author a disservice though – there may be a whole team of researchers in a laboratory somewhere, conducting surveys on people by telephone each morning as they wake up:  “So Mr Jones, you dreamt of thimbles last night did you?  Do let us know how the rest of your week works out won’t you?” ;  “Yes, hello Mr Luigi – what’s that – macaroni again you say?”

I like this book – it doesn’t attempt to justify itself.  I think my personal favourite has to be:  “To dream that you have a moustache denotes that your egotism and effrontery will bring you a poor inheritance in wordly goods and you will betray women to their sorrow”. Sir, you are cad and a bounder!

Nobody needs this much Chick Lit in their Life

From the outside, Sally/Josephine/Kirsty’s life was perfect.  She had a great job/house/figure, a loving husband/boyfriend/dog, and Charlie/Toby/Quentin was settling in very well at his new boarding school/art college/Monastery.  But something wasn’t right.  Something was troubling her, deep down, in her bosom/heart/gall bladder.  Something which would burn away inside her until one day, she inexplicably left her family/birthday party/dog to return to her American/Irish/gritty Northern roots.  How was she to know that this abrupt and ill thought through life changing decision would cause such intense joy/heartbreak/painful yeast infections?  Can Sally negotiate her way through a social minefield of ex-boyfriends/wild animals/inconsequential cups of coffee with old friends, to find true happiness with the man/woman/cake shop of her dreams before it’s too late? … Chocolate cake…shoes…more cake…more expensive shoes…rugged lover called Bruce…difficult relationship with father…skeletons from the past…angry break-up sex…self obsession…baby…divorce… massive helping of chocolate cake.

One donation, so much chick lit.   I can’t believe that this person actually read all of the 500 or so books we were sorting today.  At least I hope not..nobody needs this much early noughties, rainy south-London skyline  post-Blairite angst.  Having waded through  the first few sacks, the criteria for being kept rather than recycled became stricter – if it had a pink cover, any evidence of unspecified pink foliage on the jacket, or a cartoonised picture of a leggy blonde woman resting her chin on her hands, it was in the bin.  Only Jane Austen and above would make the final cut.  I sat, Simon Cowell like, judging the books.  “I’m sorry  ‘Apocolipstick’ – I thought you had promise with your unembossed lettering, but you ruined it all with that picture of a giant shoe covered in chocolate babies and puppies.   I don’t care if you were nominated for the Katie Price Award for Most Vacuous Title of the Year.   Watoosh…into the recycling sack with you.

There are a number of annoying things about books like this.  Firstly of course, they sell, and their authors make a lot of money, which makes them go away and write more books, which also sell.  This is annoying because the books aren’t very good, and yet because they sell, publishers will buy them and they keep getting promoted.  It’s funny though, because although the books aren’t very good, the market is absolutely cut-throat.  See how the covers compete for your attention….gold lettering, massive pictures of shoes, celebrity endorsements.   There’s also something wierd starting to happen with the titles  – they’re merging seemlessly into the first page of the book…

...because she's desperate to have a baby...before her ovaries expire...

Can you imagine if Dickens had taken this approach to the title of  ‘Great Expectations’ – ‘Great Expectations…and times are hard for a young orphan called Pip….as he meets a frightening convict in a village graveyard who will only much later repay him for stealing some bread and a rusty file to grind down his leg shackle…’.  It’s as though the cover of the book has to neatly summarise the 300 or so pages inside, which makes one wonder what exactly there is left so say.  It’s supposed to be a title, not a York Notes summary of the plot.

...see page 84 for details.

….same thing again – and what the hell cover is that?  More bloody unspecified pink foliage, but now there’s a picture of a bird staring blankly at a shop that sells dresses.  I’ve got a good story to go with that cover:  Mary was self-obsessed and failed to appreciate how lucky she was to be financially secure and have a happy home life.  On her way back to grimy Macklesfield to discover her long lost lover, Ken,  Mary goes and buys a lovely new dress from the dress shop, but as she’s walking out of the shop the pink bird in the corner shits all over the new dress, and then Mary dies because the bird was diseased and had poisonous poo.  And then the diseased bird infects the unspecified pink foliage, and it mutates and spreads a flesh eating fungus which eventually reaches Macklesfield and kills Ken and all the other half formed characters, and then the bird builds a massive bomb which destroys the dress shop and all the other badly drawn buildings, and so all that’s left is those two empty metal seats inexplicably placed in the middle of a busy road, and the bird, laughing, laughing, laughing at his work.

The first cover pictured above is rather apt, picturing as it does the image the reader will have of the sky once they toss the finished book aside and gaze dumbly upwards wondering where the last 6 hours of their life went.  And that’s the other problem with these books – they take time to read. Even though the writing is quite big and the chapters short, people have to spend numerous hours on the tube reading them.  So, I have a solution.  Rather than producing a whole book, it’s just the covers which should be sold, as paintings to be framed and put on the wall.  All the essential ideas of the plot would already be there, leaving the reader, or rather the viewer, free to assemble the interactions between the characters and manufacture the exact circumstances surrounding the ultimate fulfillment of the protagonist.  The author would no longer be required to churn out 300 pages, the reader would no longer have to spend valuable time reading it, and I wouldn’t get sore arms from carrying unwanted box after unwanted box of the things to a much deserved date with the big shredding machine.  £7.99, Tesco, bob’s your uncle.

Title:  Ease into Fitness

Author: Diana Moran

Year of publication: 1993

Condition: Fair

Notes:  How old do you think she is in that photo?  35?  40? 50?  FIFTY FOUR!   Amazing…and no small tribute to the success of her exercise regime.  Her two later books, ‘Ease into Old Age’ and ‘Ease into Retirement Care’ were inexplicably less popular.

What a work out – I don’t think I could make any of the shapes she throws in this book – least of all the one below.  Her books and accompanying videos took the early 90s fitness scene by storm.  This copy was fairly well thumbed – the person donating it probably limboed under the shop door while clenching it between their buttock cheeks.  Either that or after 16 years of daily stretches they had developed some form of crippling lower back pain…who knows.

Diana sometimes wondered if she should give up the cello

This is one of those carefully marketed books which is one first glance would seem to appeal more to women.  Then, you turn towards the middle of the book…

Readers often asked Diana where she got the ideas for her stretches from

And towards the end things start to degenerate altogether…

Men sometimes used to write to Diana suggesting other stretches she might perform. Others, sadly, just sent her pictures of their willy.

It just goes to show’ even the apparently innocent world of personal fitness is rife with temptation.  Get your coat love -you’ve pulled…a muscle.