Second hand serendipity

Oxfam’s Truro bookshop often has synchronous incidents with books. The other night I was watching Last and First Men, a 2020 Icelandic science fiction film directed by the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The film consists of shots of Communist monuments in the former Yugoslavia and has a voiceover by Tilda Swinton, plus music by Jóhannsson. Anyway, today the book the film was based on came into the shop. I’d never seen it here before.

Likewise, I was looking at my favourite blog, John Coulthart’s {feuilleton}, which was recently going through a Borges phase. The other night I was reading Goodfellow and Borges, a post about 1980s Penguin paperbacks of Jean Luis Borges short stories illustrated by Peter Goodfellow. Two of the books – The Book of Sand and The Book of Imaginary Beings – came into the shop a few days later, and it’s pretty rare to get Borges for some reason.

Both incidents could almost be the subject of a Borges short story (two of his preoccupations are books and mystery) – whatever book one reads about, it turns up the next day in the bookshop.

I know what you’re thinking – it’s a charity bookshop, we get in thousands of books a week, and it’s only because I’d read about those books that they were fresh in my mind and I noticed them.

Maybe. But I was checking the price of a few books – actually, a book about fly fishing I knew wasn’t worth much but I looked at the publishing details and noticed the photos were by my late uncle, Bryce. I knew he did food photography but hadn’t seen this book before.

I had never heard the name Wilhelmina Barns-Graham before until someone mentioned her to me the other day. Later a young man came into the bookshop and bought an audio tape of George Melly talking about the Tate St. Ives in 1995. Okay, I thought, and asked the man about his purchase. He explained that he was part of Sounds Like Cornwall, an online project responsible for digitalising old analogue Cornish recordings, such as cassettes and records.

I checked the YouTube site a few days later and lo and behold there was bohemian and raconteur George Melly chatting away to local artists including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Peter Randall-Page and David Kemp (the man responsible for Redruth’s welly sculptures) in a very interesting 40 minute show. Listen below:

Previously on Barnflakes
This afternoon in the bookshop
Echoes of mirrors