As the manager of Oxfam Books in Truro, Cornwall, I come across hundreds of books, records, CDs and DVDs on a daily basis. Here are a dozen recent book barngains I’ve picked up (DVDs I mentioned recently; here’s music).

Top to bottom: Atlas Obscura I’ve been on their mailing list for years, but nice to get the book; Land by Fay Godwin; The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun Surrealist painter, occultist, poet and writer, the book is Colquhoun’s quest ‘to find an artist’s studio and sanctuary from the modern world’; Nests by Susan Ogilvy Beautiful life-size watercolour paintings of bird nests; Beautiful Leaved Plants by Edward Joseph Lowe ‘a stunning guide to the most exquisite and beautiful plants in cultivation in the UK’, originally published in 1861; Ravilious by James Russell I’ve probably mentioned how I rarely buy expensive exhibition catalogues from the gallery shop when I see an exhibition – instead I wait years for them to come into a charity shop and buy them for a song. In this case, it was the wonderful exhibition of Eric Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2015; London Overlooked (and City Sights, not pictured) by Geoffrey Fletcher Most famous for The London Nobody Knows, Fletcher was the original London flâneur, sketching and writing over a dozen books about overlooked aspects of the capital. These two came in and I nabbed them immediately. Fletcher’s books aren’t worth as much as they once were but I love them; The Trams by Lon Meitong Lovely illustrations of Hong Kong’s trams; Otherlands by Thomas Halliday ‘an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours’; Silent Spring by Rachel Carson One of the most influential books of the 20th century, it exposed the deadly use of pesticides resulting in the changing of environmental laws; Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn ‘A beautiful, lyrical exploration of the places where nature is flourishing in our absence’; Exploring Beauty by Tony Foster Another exhibition catalogue, this one of stunning large scale watercolours from around the natural world. Similar to Foster’s A Fragile Planet exhibition from last year that I visited.

Previously on Barnflakes
Barngains
Second hand serendipity
This afternoon in the bookshop
Page 11 fella
London through its charity shops

Elsewhere on Barnflakes
BARNGAINS