Bookshop bonanza

I was in my local Oxfam bookshop today – ‘just to have a look’ – and had the most unbelievable luck in terms of finds. I got Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots (the play which introduced the word and concept of a robot to the world), a book about the fraudulent Holocaust memoirist Binjamin Wilkomirski, AND Hassan by James Elroy Flecker which I’ve wanted for ages – the poem/play which includes the famous lines ‘for lust of knowing what should not be known/ We take the Golden Road to Samarkand’. Three things knocked off my Amazon wishlist, plus I got a copy of Mrs Dalloway with a nice cover. All for under a tenner.

Sometimes you get a whole stack of interesting books in a charity shop but they tend to be on the same, or related, topics. Finding three books that all relate to completely different interests – Central Asia, European modernism, trauma writing – was very odd indeed.