It's always a nice surprise to find something unexpected when one is rummaging around in charity or secondhand shops, and that was precisely what one man experienced as he rifled through some book shelves in a shop in Hindley, near Wigan.
Moys Kenwood, 56, of Oaf-on-Sea, East Yorkshire, had travelled to the Lancashire hamlet by train to see his friend, Kev, but arrived at the station in the middle of the afternoon, and had two hours to kill before his friend knocked-off work.
Instead of turning right when he came out of the station, he turned left, and walked down a hill to see what was there.
He saw some shops, and decided to take a peek.
Two of these shops were charity shops - Kenwood's favourite kind - and he rolled his sleeves up and dived in, keenly.
The first, Annie's Curiosity Shop, had little to offer the classic book fiend, but the second, across the road, the Wigan & Leigh Hospice, was a goldmine.
The first nugget he spied was Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick', closely followed by 'Walden' by Henry David Thoreau. Sensing a literary orgasm, his eyes scoured the spines.
The Russians were there. 'Cancer Ward' and 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' by Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Idiot', Mikhail Sholokov's 'And Quiet Flows the Don', and Ivan Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons'.
He picked up three titles by Emile Zola - 'Germinal', 'The Belly of Paris' and 'La Bête Humaine' - and Charles Darwin's 1859 'On the Origin of Species'. Now in a frenzy, he realised somebody with disturbingly-good taste must have expired, and, under his breath, Kenwood promised to take good care of the treasure.
He asked the old lady at the till:
"How much are the books, love?"
She looked up from her knitting, only marginally interested, and said:
"Oh, ash'd think y'can 'ave four fr'a pound, love. The ronny gatherin' dust!
