Awful Antique Shops

I see Dead People's Stuff

How do you get your thrills on Halloween? We just take a tour of our local ‘antique shop’. Owned by a house clearance company, it's the end of the road for dead people's stuff, and the sight of all those personal things piled-up high - as if a JCB was involved, not a human hand - is more chilling to me than any horror film.

It's a clever trap. A Victorian building offers a respectable face to the high street with an almost tidy and ordered interior, you browse at ease, but once you step through the door at the back - into the much older buildings that lurk behind -  it begins. No wall is straight. No angle is 90 degrees. No floor is level. Under your feet a crazy patchwork of grimy linoleum, mildew carpet and spongy floor boards fractures your sanity, but you barely notice.

I spotted three church organs like this with the
cliché pull-out stops labelled in gothic writing. Unfortunately, not one of them read "bats"

And then there's the stuff. Pictures so crammed in a box so it’s impossible to look at them. Pianos going slowly insane in the dampness. Suitcases piled-up behind a wooden staircase.

This room had many metal hooks embedded in the ceiling.

When you do pull-free of these spaces and head for daylight, you don't find yourself back in the safety of the high street, oh no. You blink a little and realise you've arrived at the centre of the Antique Shop experience, in a courtyard, also crammed with things, things full or rainwater. Surrounding you are more doorways. And more rooms. Waiting.

The courtyard. Rainwater gathers in Grandma's best china.

The owners have another outlet in town. There things are cherished: dusted, ordered, displayed in cabinets with posh price labels tied on a string. But this stuff failed the test. Poor peoples' stuff; stuff they don't think they can sell.

It’s ghoulish to walk around, I admit. But the stories these things tell.

Photo albums. Boxes labelled 'Mrs Mason's House'. Shell monstrosities bearing the legend A Souvenir from Scarborough.

Then I see things from my Grandparents' houses (not the actual thing but something just like). Then I see something that was brand new when I was a child. The shudders keep on coming.

It's curtains.

I giggle at other people voicing my thoughts:

'Oh my God! There’s another room.'

'I’m going to need a bath after this.'

'Urgh it’s full of rainwater; who would buy…?'

How many Christmas Dinners have these witnessed?

In one room are several dolls houses that have been hand-made, probably because the family could not afford one from a shop. That's what happened in my family, anyway. These seem especially sad.

At this point in our ride, my boyfriend (a photographer) asked if we could leave now, because he was getting the same kind of cough he got when he had to take photographs in that dead man's house. I said to him 'har har, very funny'.

Then he reminded me of the details of the job, and I remembered it did happen.

A few years ago, he had to take some 'before and after' shots for a cleaning company that specialised in clearing houses after people had died. People that had never cleaned or thrown anything away. He recalled the dead rat they found in the living room under a pile of junk, with dead maggots inside. Opposite the comfy chair was a stack of take-away trays to head height.

Time to go indeed. Sleep well.

Colour Coordinated Bookshelves - I did it... I love it!

Bookshelves and Brick Dust

I suppose it started here.  

This was my living room a month ago. See either side of the sooty mouth of Hell? Empty bookshelves. I had taken the books down and tucked them away from the nasty man with the big hammer. And here lies the tale of how I put the books back. But first, a little more about that building work.

The hole became a tunnel to the ‘others side’ (well dining room, actually) so the brick dust had a whole new place to huff and puff into. The tunnel became this...

Ah… lovely straight lines, smooth surfaces and a proper passage that my children ran through a thousand times. But no mopping or painting or putting-back yet for my twitching fingers. Plaster and cement had to dry.

Then there was this, the whole point of the exercise: a double-sided wood burning stove that is designed (because our home is mostly on one level) to provide our heating in winter. Rude gestures at the gas company and a very dainty carbon footprint should be the reward of all the work, and so far the stove has made both rooms supremely cosy. But what about the books?

The books. I may have 500. In my living room: fiction. Upstairs, non-fiction. In my children’s bedrooms, children’s books. In my bedroom, knackered books, the ones the ghosts hover around. A set of Greek mythology my grandfather bound himself back in the 60s. The Warfare of Science with Theology by Andrew Dickson White. The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805 by Mungo Park. A Welsh bible, Y Beibl, that was my great-grandmothers.

But back to the empty shelves in the living room. Having suffered a ball and chain of a cold for the duration of the building work, I found that I couldn't be arsed to put these particular books back. At least, not as they were. I had a new stove, a new dimension in my front parlour. I craved a new look from my books, too.

Then I remembered a blog post by Miss Read on the very subject of how to organise your bookshelves, which I had read and commented on. I went back to the blog, and found myself saying:

"I order my books by look, which can lead to some kind of order, the poetry tends to be small, art books big, Penguin Classics make an orange block over there, and as long as you don’t switch from paperback to hardback by the same author, their stuff tends to go together too…"

“Penguin Classics make an orange block over there”. Hmm, there was a thought that tickled. Maybe I had to take that logic further. Could I put them back just by spine colour? Sod the author, genre, size even. The Dulux paint chart approach to ordering books. 

And that thought was quite a starting pistol. Without pausing for Lemsip, I stopped reading spines and started seeing colours. Aiming for contrast, I stacked greens over purples and reds, and blues over yellows and oranges. Blacks created a solid foundation on the bottom shelves, whites the top. So much easier than working out where you are in the alphabet. So much kinder than forcing books into clichéd genres. Grabbing and slotting by shade felt wonderfully liberating.

Books I had forgotten about took on new significance because of their fabulous spines of indigo, jade or acid lemon. Books I loved were tutted at for not trying hard enough with their faded white.

Patterns emerged. Science fiction dominated the blues, horror the blacks, fantasy the greens, chick-lit the pinks. Like a row of sunbeams, the Penguin classics welcomed Irvine Welsh’s orange and black Trainspotting into their ranks.

I loved the surprises. Alan Moore's From Hell, a new edition of Jane Eyre and Robert Sabuda’s pop-up treatment of Wizard of Oz formed a bohemian gathering in sultry purples and magentas. Titus Groan and Gormenghast parted company with Titus Alone. Clad in black, Dickens and Austen skulked among the thrillers and horrors. India Knight's My Life on a Plate crash landed on Brian W Aldiss’s Helliconia Spring, the planet where seasons last 1000 years. John Wyndham's Seeds of Time, its red spine bleached by sunlight to a delicate pink, embraced an anthology of love poems.

And then there was the whites. Two shelves of them. I left these till last when I was reaching the point of obsession with nuances of shade, so they were sifted further from pristine to yellowed, which indicated the age of the actual edition. A good way to see how long you have owned something.

So that's how it looks (with some editing of the chimney breast for effect). But can I find anything with my new system? Actually I can. When I think of a book I own I can see the spine in my head, clearly, so it works just dandy for me.

My beloved books are back and they look decorative and dramatic. I can’t ask for more. But there is more: I think the books are enjoying themselves too.