#charity shops

[borninwinter81]

A good day for goth accessories at the charity shop. Each of these were £1. I particularly love the big 80s belt.

[cottonkhaleesi]

Godson’s getting a sibling in May and with the Winter of Illnesses and such, I have Not been Inspired to make baby things much. But as they say; if you don’t have your own creativity, store bought is fine.

The waistcoat and red jumper I found today in a charity shop that has small bins of donated handmade knitwear for kids sorted by size. I made the mittens using up some scraps, bought the book in another charity shop, and threw in some eye cream for mama.

And finally I have a present that fits in this odd shaped box I upcycled and have not been able to get rid of for years. Yippee!!

[iamstuckinthevoid]

£17 typewriter my beloved

[propagated-fern]

04 Mar 23

I'm feeling very Theodore Finch today. As in his different identities; mine is very academic, craving a lot of knowledge recently (I'll probably research oxytocin 🧬 tomorrow)

Got a lot more revision done than yesterday—still not as much as I'd hoped, but I'm consistent with it and almost finished Geography 🌍.

I really enjoyed today actually. Got a nice breakfast with my mum 🥞, went grocery shopping and then to about 3 charity shops with her. Ate a good amount of snacks today and watched a lot of Friends. I also found my fav playlist 🎶 (for right now anyways) and it's by RougeSkye who makes incredible playlists!

[shiftythrifting]

Seen in the window of a North London Hospice In Muswell Hill

[livinginsideabookshelf]

One of the best things in life is finding the book you wanted in a charity shop and seeing it for only £1. It does not get better!

[hyacinthi-mortem]

IM BROKE AGAIN- BOUGHT A BUNCH OF CDS IN CHARITY SHOPS + 1 IN HMV

[amiscellany]

I’m a man of a certain age and size. An XL Fred Perry shirt fits me, physically and culturally. It’s as stylish as I can get without feeling stifled, it locates me temporally in the 2 Tone/post-punk era that shaped me as an impressionable teenager and it’s smart enough to sport on stage but casual enough for me to wear around the house in just my pants. My clothes rail has a dozen identical Fred Perrys and I especially used to favour the black ones with yellow trim. But apparently, according to a pink-haired hipster girl in the merch queue at one of my Leicester Square theatre shows five years back, this has now been adopted as a covert uniform by the far right in Europe and the US. So I quickly took six neo-Nazi black and yellow Fred Perry shirts to the local People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals charity shop, where hopefully they were snapped up by a delighted cat-loving north London racist.

[bella-but-not-hadid444]

@w1n3bunny you’re not gonna fucking believe this…

i was going to loads of charity shops and i found this awesome gem i- THERE WERE 2 FOR SALE!!!

i didn’t buy it bc i really don’t need a PnF satchel + i am not as obsessed as i was a couple months ago

[borninwinter81]

A most excellent lace top, found yesterday for £3. I think the part on the chest is especially beautiful. It's difficult to get a full selfie photo of it which shows all the detail, but the lower part is essentially a fitted bodice style with a lace outer layer. Fastened with a zip down one side, and buttons at the back of the neck.

Its appropriate for my office job too, when I wear stuff like this I tend to get compliments for looking extra fancy. Thankfully my workplace doesn't mind my tattoos being visible!

[teastainedpaper]

Getting Ready for Christmas

Getting Ready for Christmas

Now that December is upon us, and the festive cheer is showing its face in the form of an abundance of tinsel and lights it really is time to prepare. Ever since I was at university, I’ve always made a Christmas spreadsheet to keep track of everything. It’s so easy to overspend, or accidentally forget someone, that I decided to compile it all in a handy spreadsheet I can use year on year. I…

[landlordrecords]

Charity CD shopping for beginners

About nine years ago, I did THIS post: https://www.tumblr.com/landlordrecords/77471855182/charity-record-shopping-for-beginners , which I thought was quite good & summed up the subject of shopping for records in charity shops quite well, & seemed to get the odd nice comment. Since then, vinyl has swung back into favour, & everyone now seems to think every piece of vinyl is worth a fortune, & hence the charity shops either have overpriced vinyl or none at all (as either the shops sell them online or at central stores, or punters hold onto them or sell them online). Hence, the current state of the charity shops for vinyl is very poor, back to the days of largely bad easy listening & 80s records. It must be an annoying time to be starting out as a record collector (can you imagine starting now? Jeez. It was a tall enough order when I started at the beginning of the 90s). I covered CDs briefly in that piece, but I felt that with the way things have gone, that bit needed expanding somewhat. As with the previous one, if you’ve been around for a while, most of this will be obvious, but...

When the vinyl in charity shops started drying up a few years ago, I noticed the CDs were becoming more plentiful & cheaper. I often largely ignored these before, rushing from shop to shop when I was in a town for an hour or two, to look at all the vinyl. CDs in charity shops often used to be relatively expensive (£3/£4), considering that you can’t always guarantee they will play right, & the selection often poor. Now, as more people clear out collections & settle for streaming, the charity shops didn’t know what to do with them all, they had so many, & they have dropped to a max of usually £1.25, & often even 20p/25p, at which price it doesn’t really matter if the odd one doesn’t play (indeed, this is cheaper than replacement jewel cases used to be - if I was more mercenary, I’d hoover up loads of Westlife CDs, throw out the discs & replace all my bust boxes). With the pandemic, there was a huge amount of stuff people had time to sort & throw out, & this did seem to cause a charity shop wobble, with some being overwhelmed with CDs they couldn’t get rid of, & stopping doing them altogether (I even stuck one place £20 when they were literally giving away two rooms full of discs & I’d handpicked 100 from them). This seems to have calmed down now though. I have no idea how many I’ve bought in recent years - certainly many hundreds, maybe low thousands - I’ve had to start a supplementary part of my collection at my parents’ house, at the other end of the country, for the less exciting ones, there have been so many. Don’t get me wrong, I REALLY love vinyl - I was a record collector for several years before we even got a CD player, & I just stuck with it, BUT I’m not ultra-fussy - I do like to have physical copies of things, but don’t really mind what format, & new vinyl prices are truly mental, so... CDs also do have some obvious advantages - more compact, not better but more reliable audio playback (& probably better audio for a small but significant number of very quiet releases where you’d need virgin vinyl kept pristine to get good audio for them on vinyl), plus readymade for ripping from. 

My first big bagging was a couple of full collections of hip hop CDs - I pretty much completely overhauled my hip hop collection, filling in classics I’d never got round to, pretty much full (relevant) discographies for various rappers I’d never caught up with. There were earlier & later ones, but the bulk were from what I’d call the silver age (mid 90s-early 2000s), a lot of which I had ignored because of the received wisdom that this generation of hip hop albums were overlong, had too many skits, were just a couple of singles & an hour of filler. I have to say, this changed my opinion on that - I generally listen to CDs in the car, often hopping between stop-offs, & (taken in this episodic way, & able to dedicate more concentration than I can often give rap lyrics, while driving mechanically around well-known streets), I found most (certainly not all) to be way better than that, & well worth a listen or two. Also (& this isn’t new, but I’ve increased it), I spend a lot of time looking at 90s CD singles: these were often ultra-long, full of soundalike remixes, & I found this a chore at the time, but (still fiending for a lot of stuff from then), it’s surprising how many have good quality mixes buried away deep into the tracklist, even ones by acts you wouldn’t normally touch with a bargepole, & while some might be expensive on vinyl, they’re certainly not on CD single (if you can spot them). With the aforementioned episodic driving, I even quite like listening to half an hour’s worth of mixes of the same tune in order to find the goodies!

Most of the rules which I gave in the earlier piece, regarding vinyl, stay the same here -

For the Collector, Not the Dealer: I know several people who have advocated for years not to throw the baby out with the bath water on CDs - yes, they started overpriced, but became a useful, cheap way to pick up catalogue BUT they are not generally worth much still. I am starting to see rumblings that this is changing (think pieces etc), & it surely will do over time, as supplies on some titles get tighter; plus I seem to be selling cheap CDs better than a few years ago, for ever so slightly more, & occasionally for good prices BUT this is not a goldmine, it is for the enthusiast.

Broad Not Deep: Some genres I barely find in charity shops - for instance, any experimental stuff will be near-random & rare, & I don’t see much metal at all (I presume people hold onto it or swoop in first). Hence, you can’t generally go in expecting to find certain stuff (with the odd exception of ones I’ve seen hundreds of times but not thought I was interested in, then hear, like, & know I can go out & find within the next few stores). To be heavily into it, you need to be into a broad spread of stuff, & prepared to come home with a pretty random selection, commercial or obscure.

Go In Them All, Look At Every CD: Charity shops are seriously random, you never know what will come in when.

Be Prepared For Defeat: To be fair, with charity shop CDs at the mo, I could always buy SOMETHING, but try to keep your quality control going & be prepared to be pleased just to have swept that area recently. I sometimes find comps that have one or two tracks I’m after, but I listen to everything (eventually), & can’t always bear the thought of hearing all the other tracks I’ve got ten times over yet again.

If It Seems Right, Ask: I haven’t bothered getting into situations where I might get into the storeroom so much with CDs as with vinyl, but I still do occasionally get invited to look at further hidden stock if I ask if they’ve any more music. Worth a go in the right situation.

The Genres You Don’t Buy Yet: Refer back to Broad Not Deep.

Prices: We are starting to get back to where a few of the chains now have a special shop where they send all the good stuff (books, DVDs, CDs), & ramp the prices up. I’m willing to look, but unlikely to buy anything, at big prices in charity shops unless it’s some unbelievable find - most CDs are probably the same price or less new online still. Fair play to them though, & the prices aren’t as mental as those they sometimes put on vinyl yet (that trend has spread further & further, & to be fair, in recent years, has thrown up a handful of charity shops where they are clearly run by someone who knows their stuff, & I have found myself looking at racks & racks of things I never really thought I’d see copies of...but I can’t afford).

CONDITION

This was what I wanted to expand on most - I didn’t previously say much before regarding CD condition, other than that they don’t always play. I’m no expert on CD cleaning, so this is very much a rough guide, but:

Look at the playing surface of the disc in the light (usually the silver side with no artwork, although there are other colours, & sometimes I think you get double-sided ones, & some might have basically zero artwork, so are plain silver either side - hence, be slightly careful). If there is some dirt or whatever on it, it’ll probably come off - just give it a brush - & it’ll be fine. As with vinyl, with scratches it largely comes down to how deep they look - if it has just brushed against some stuff, it will probably be fine (although I might leave it if it is a spiderweb of such marks), if the marks look like it has literally been scratched, it might still play but I would generally just leave it. If you can see through the disc where paint has flecked off, it is toast, leave it. You won’t see many cracked ones, but obviously they won’t play. Beyond that, it is hard to tell - I was playing a DVD I’d picked up for 20p the other week, got halfway through & it started skipping chapters. When I got it out, I realised I must not have checked it very well, & the entire playing surface was covered in some sort of misty see-through build-up. I spent quite a while putting it under a slow cold tap, dabbing it dry with a soft towel, & repeating (all my CD-cleaning stuff died some years ago & it’s not something I need often enough to replace), eventually then rubbing the watery surface repeatedly when the previous technique wasn’t making much difference. It played fine afterwards. Others might look fine but not play at all - they can be temperamental.

Disc rot seems to mainly affect a generation of CDs from about the early 90s, although I’ve not seen it often enough to take much interest in it. It sounds like the name (look it up on Google Images), & obviously isn’t good if you do stumble across one with it. Bronzing comes from the same period (the discs end up looking bronze in colour), & I don’t remember having issues with ones like this, although I read that they will degrade, & they look pretty ugly.

Packaging-wise, if the disc has been kept OK, there may well be next to nothing wrong with the booklet etc - sometimes they’re a bit bent up or have rusty staples. The main annoyance is when they’ve been pushed in incorrectly & there are marks from the tray tabs on the booklet. This isn’t going to bother me unless they’ve caused a heck of a lot of damage. You also get water-damaged ones - best avoided, but if they are valuable ones & it’s just a bit of moisture (not everything stuck together), buyers don’t seem to mind. The real issue with CD packaging is the darned boxes. You can have lots of little imperfections with vinyl packaging, but in most cases, if it’s there, it looks broadly OK. CDs, however, were blessed with the dreaded jewel case, one of man’s worst inventions. To be fair, these are easily replaceable, & do generally do the job of protecting what’s inside, but they are also seriously maddening. They often get cracked, not that that is usually a big deal, but the worst is the hinges breaking off - they are really delicate. I have so many sat around here that I sometimes only have to move my chair around slightly to have another few to replace. About as annoying are the teeth which are meant to keep the disc in place - you can often open them straight from the factory & half of these are already broken off or flattened. Arguably better, but still flawed, are digipaks (the ‘softback’ of CD packaging) - these look way nicer to start with, but (as the tray is glued into the card), if the teeth go, it somewhat ruins the effect, & they are a bit prone to getting rubbed & scraped & little tears. I’m starting to think about putting my better ones in PVC slips. Far too late in the day, the industry eventually came up with super jewel cases, which are basically the same design & size as jewel cases, but much more robust (particularly around the hinge areas) & feature the latest in a long line of attempts to improve on the teeth. To be honest, I have relatively few of these, so the jury is still out for me, but they’re certainly better than what came before. Either way, as mentioned above, jewel cases are pretty much interchangeable & therefore easy to replace (it is more the number that need replacing after a while that is irritating) - some of the majors did do their own branded ones, but it is subtle & they did enough that these aren’t hard to replace either, if you are so inclined. I’ve never seen anyone arguing the toss over what generation of jewel case is on their expensive second-hand CD purchase, although I can imagine that coming in the future.

CDRs are a separate thang. A brilliant format to start with (wow, home recording artists can cheaply make their own releases, as with cassettes, but you can skip to individual tracks), they have turned out to be rather temperamental. To be fair, I have been examining mine a bit in recent times & it does mainly seem to be very early ones from certain labels (ie certain makes of machine) that have died, & even if they don’t work in players anymore, they sometimes still rip (or vice versa) - this is also the case with skipping CDs in general. A lot of the stuff that has died was by people who are still around, loading stuff up on Bandcamp etc, so it isn’t the end of the world but (as with breaking delicate 78s), it is a bit galling when they go, although some collectors don’t even seem to mind, they just want the item for posterity. If you’ve got lots of CDRs you haven’t ripped at high quality, especially early ones, it might be time to get them done if still possible.

VALUE?

There are, of course, plenty of CDs which are rare, although it is limited numbers compared to vinyl (which, as well as being generally agreed as more attractive, has a much longer history). The sort I see going for extreme money are one-offs (studio discs of work in progress etc), or box sets, or very obscure but trendy stuff, but there are plenty of second hand ones around at old CD prices (£10-15): if you imagine picking one of them up in every fifty 20p CDs from charity shops, it helps keep things affordable. I suspect some very early CDs might be worth money (although I’ve not seen much evidence of it in ones I’ve had, & would note that some of the early reissues have quite poor sound quality, obviously transferred from vinyl ‘needledrops’ rather than master tapes). I generally have a look at pop ones from past the mid-2000s, as sometimes these weren’t done in very long runs & can be worth at least enough to keep my hobby going, although it does vary (the golden rule is to only buy stuff I’d happily keep if it’s not worth anything). Certainly you see a lot of more recent promo ones by people who went on to be big going for inflated prices on Discogs, although this may wane over time, as they fall out of favour. The most valuable CD I own is the first Sleaford Mods CD(R), picked up as I think one of the last copies, just as they were about to go big. The most valuable I’ve picked up from a charity or junk shop is a donk double mix CD (!), but that’s only worth 50 quid, so you’re not going to make your fortune here BUT YOU ARE GOING TO PICK UP LOTS OF INTERESTING MUSIC YOU’VE NEVER HEARD BEFORE.

[realkaijuhavecurves]

I was manning the till of the thrift store where I work just now and an older lady came in and started complaining about food prices going up, specifically the price of cat food:

"I don't have a cat, but I have three crows who have been visiting for five years now and they need their weekly can of cat food, and their daily pack of Digestives. Oh, the Digestives have also gone up terribly."

I love my job sometimes

[k00286654]

Re-Brainstorming (8th October)

I decided to rebrainstorm my project to include a variety of subjects to study as i found my other ideas to be either too vague or limited.

The main ideas i had were to build off of Fashion, Perishable Items vs. Single-use Plastics, Objects and Emotions & Body Language.

I will take all my ideas into account when exploring the theme of 'Temporary', but the phrases and ideas i have highlighted are:

Fashion > Fast Fashion > Sustainability, Junk Kouture, "reuse, rewear", disposable fashion trends

Fashion > Homemade > crochet & knitting clothing > reusing wool

Fashion > Second-hand > charity shop> "second-hand fashion trends"- resurgence of 60's, 70's, 80's, etc. fashion > resurgence of cassettes, vhs, cd's, vinyl > nostalgia based culture- people trying to relive when they were young and care-free (a temporary period) > aesthetics vs. practicality

Emotions & Body Language > Reactions are a fight or flight response > subconcious physical or facial reactions > temporary moments - mid-movement, mid-speaking

Objects > Charity shop items > (my items from charity shops) Artemis bust, Nefertiti bust, Budd'ai statue, jewelery, books > items temporarily owned > temporary sentiment > itemshistorically of extreme sacred and spiritual value, reserved for the rich and holy, are now attainable and mass produced > cultural context

Primary Research from home

Charity shop items and temporary meaning & sentiment

The blue vase was once owned for my nana. It was bought as a birthday gift from a charity shop for her in the 80's and was passed onto my mam when she passed away. There are 3 generations of meaning behind this vase: by its first owner who placed it in a charity shop, as a birthday gift to my nana and now as my mam's memory of her own mam.

I bought these children's bookends in the Limerick Animal Welfare charity shop. I bought them because i found them to be quite haunting, why were they put into a charity shop, had a child outgrown them or had they outgrown the child?

i bought this statue of Artemis/Diana in the Curiosity Shop. I have always been fascinated by ancient cultures and their art and spirituality. This stauette is a replica of the Diana of Versailles, the statue given by Pope Paul IV to Henry II of France in 1556. Historically stuatues of gods were reserved for royality, the church and people of high power and i found this highly contrasted to a small statuette of one of the most revered Gods laying forgotten on a charity shop shelf.

Budai has origins centered around cult worship and local legend. Although, an "uncommitted saint" the Chan Masters , leaders in the initial merging of local legend and Buddhist tradition, hoped the induction of likable and odd figures would attract all types of people to the Chan tradition, no matter their gender, social background (not really related to the theme but i really liked this idea).

My mam bought me this in a charity shop when i was younger. The Nefertiti Bust is a painted stucco-coated limestone bust of Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife of Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. In Ancient Egyptian culture, the purpose of portraits, statues and art as a whole was deeply rooted in their belief systems; so long as your image continued, your soul would live on. The egyptians did not fear physical death, but spiritual death, they understood that your physical life was limited - temporary- but the memory of you would keep your spirit alive. Nefertiti has succeeded in this as she is still extremely revered and marveled upon, 3367 years since this bust's creation.

Scenes from my bedroom; charity shop bought Bust of Diana, second hand bought books, empty perfume bottle, burnt out candles and a melted candle stick (might draw studies of this)- all signs of life.

Another scene from my bedroom; charity shop bought frog teddy, empty bottles, secondhand 'Pre-Raphaelite' book, science and mythology books given to me by my granda, crochet piece- using wool scraps, Star Wars toys that my dad loved to collect- now belong to me and help me to remember him.

[photosofsuburbia]

Nottingham, England