The Hamely Tongue à Paris

John Erskine

In autumn 2010 Oxfam opened the second of its second-hand bookshops in Paris, in the Rue Daguerre. The first Oxfam bookshop in France was opened in Lille, and this was followed quickly by its second in Paris. While such bookshops are an established feature of most of our towns and cities, it apparently took the inhabitants of Lille and Paris a little time fully to grasp the concept of a charity bookshop. ‘How much will you pay me for my books?’, they would ask the staff, only to be told that the idea was that they should hand in their books for nothing: an entirely different concept from dealing with the specialist antiquarian bookshops or haggling with the bouquinistes along the Seine.

However, the concept now seems well and clearly established. A box of books was donated to the shop in the Rue Daguerre, some six months after its opening. The box contained, inter alia, a copy of the third edition of James Fenton’s Hamely Tongue. Who the donor was, nobody knew, nor why a resident of the great city should have taken (and then lost?) an interest in wor ain leid.

The staff also displayed some uncertainty about the book. What exactly was the book about? Where should it be categorized? The book shuttled between the ‘Language and Linguistics’ section and the ‘English Non-Fiction’ section but neither section achieved a sale. In October 2011 it remained unsold although, our Paris correspondent informs us, a man was seen thumbing through it, only to put it back on the shelves. Later in the same month it became the centre-piece of a Scottish-focused window display (see photograph). Alas it attracted no immediate purchaser. However, our latest news is that it was rescued — on the point of its relegation to the one-euro bargain box — by an enthusiastic purchaser who was visiting our correspondent. It is now to form, we learn, part of a Christmas present to a friend — in Canada!

Now, has anyone ever seen — or bought — a book on Occitan in a Belfast charity shop?