Heeelp!

Frenetic Sunday starting at 6 am feeding the cats, tableting those that need it and washing up a mountain of cat dishes.

Then to the bookshop at nine to load Nicola's car with boxes of books for our sale at ASDA. Unload, wave goodbye to Pat and Amy who stay to begin setting up, then return to shop and repeat the process.

Grab bike, off to Burleigh st to open up our shop there and let in Glenn with the large dog collecting box from the stall at Arbury Carnival.

On arrival, discover Saturday team evidently had several gigantic donations of sale items (good) but hadn't had time to do any processing (less good as stock room now so full I can't move).

Decide nothing I can do about this for the present and open up. 

Feed coffee to the wonderful volunteer who takes over the till and stagger back to do battle with the horror. 

Inspection of the bags fortunately reveals several of them contain things that can be processed while at the till; mostly this involves attaching gift aid stickers and a price and is easily done with small items such as DVDs and videos.

We recently put out an appeal for soft toys, and our supporters have done us proud; lots of these, and again quickly sorted and priced. Legally we can only sell soft toys if they have the "CE" kite mark which should mean they are safe for children.

In a couple of hours we must have put out at least 200 individual items between us. This is key to a successful shop as customers will only keep coming back if they see new stock coming out each day.

By 5 pm we are about ready to drop, but the level in the stock room has dropped enough for the remaining unsorted bags to be stacked fairly neatly in our sorting bins ready for the Monday team to start hanging and steaming clothes to fill the shop rails which have been depleted by shoppers during the day.

Cash up and reconcile the till and find we've taken £188.40; reasonably good for a Sunday. 

Unfortunately this means Pat and Nicola have to be left to pack up and transport the unsold book sale remains on their own, which is heavy work as only a proportion of books will go at any sale.

We need more help (or I need to be twins!)

Volunteers needed at our 2nd hand bookshop

Many thanks to the hard-working volunteers who've made it possible to open our bookshop at 188 Mill road for two extra days per week—so we can now keep on fundraising on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. We still need at least four more people so we can open on Monday and Tuesday, and ideally enough to try opening on Sundays as an experiment.

Mill road is never likely to become busy enough to generate enough income to employ paid staff and still make a profit to fund our animal welfare work (which, after all, is the reason for having a shop at all; there wouldn't be any point if it would actually raise more money if we closed it and I got a second job stacking shelves in Asda and donated the proceeds). However, because rents are low in comparison with more central areas, we can generate really useful funds on a "low input, low output" basis.

Books and CDs need proportionately less manual effort to prepare for sale than the more general charity shop stock, and it's relatively easy to run the shop using amateur enthusiasts. If you love books and reading, there's always something interesting to find among the day's donations.

Don't be daunted by the thought of having to learn to use the till; we arrange training either in the bookshop itself, or up at our main Burleigh Street shop, and there are also back-room tasks that need doing if you really feel it's not your thing.

If you might be interested in volunteering, please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk 

Saturday at the bookshop

Bulging stock room

Followed by nice, full shelves in the shop

Many thanks for the wonderful donations of books this week, including lots of out of print Penguins, which are very popular.

Stephanie and I are now bent double after hours sifting through sacks of books, but the RSPCA bookshop's shelves are promisingly full.

The shop is now opening Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but we still need to recruit more volunteers so we can cover the full six days, and possibly Sunday too.

If you might be interested in volunteering, please email camshop@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Donated to our second hand bookshop

Catalogue of books printed in the fifteenth century now in the British Museum

The photo doesn't give much idea of how big the actual thing is—there are multiple volumes and each is huge. They're actually brownish rather than green, but I took the picture under fluorescent light and the colour of the photo is a bit odd.

Many thanks to the donor (who must have had quite a job getting it to the shop!).

Bookshop at 188 Mill Road

This is a bit of an experiment. The bookshop is now taking "want" requests for books, so if you're looking for a favourite out of print author (or simply a cheaper 2nd hand copy of an expensive text), fill in the details to let us know and we'll keep an eye out for it as new donated stock comes in.

The permanent location for the form will be at www.rspcabookshop.co.uk/wantlist.html