Thrifting

I always haunt the thrift stores when I have a couple of hours in a new city. I have a little side gig where I buy books in the Thrift Store for $2.50 or $3 and then I sell them online for $12 or $15. The percentages are pretty good, I just need to scale it up so I'm making the same return on say a $10,000 investment. Books like the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham or The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene are titles that I can easily flip in a week and so even though I don't want to fill my suitcase with heavy books I'd buy any of those that I saw.

So here I am in a nice little Thrift Store in Vancouver. I'm out visiting my daughter, she moved here three years ago to go to University. I've been here for a week over summer holidays and today was the first day she had had to work. She works at a clothing store and hates it, but that's good motivation to get a University degree, so you won't always have to work at a clothing store. After dropping her off at the store I headed out thrifting, I didn't know that was a verb till about three years ago. My best find so far has been a couple of Dr. Seuss books. A mint version of Oh The Places You'll Go and a well read but good condition McElligot's Pool. I've sold other copies of these two for $11 each before, so again a nice return on an investment of $1.50 each (kids books are cheaper). Oh and there on the shelf was a black moleskin journal. My brother had told me that next time I go back to India to make sure I journal every day. This journal was brand new, never been used. It is surprising how many journals you come across that have been written in for the first 7 or 8 pages and then whoever it was writing just stopped. People have great intentions as journal writers but not everybody can follow through for very long.

Three months later .... I'd sold both of the Dr. Seuss books just like I'd expected ($11 and $9) but I'd just put the Black Moleskin Journal on top of a pile and like any book lover can tell you piles grow. Another book goes on top and then another and then you start another pile right beside it. But today was that day that comes around once every six months where a packrat gets the urge to tidy. Normally that urge doesn't last too long because as you tidy you find something interesting you'd forgotten about and next thing you know you're immersed in a side project or browsing a good book you'd forgotten about.

I'd picked up the Black book with the intentions solely of seeing what was underneath it in the stack, but once you pick up a book you riffle through it front to back fingers holding the spine and thumb on the open pages. Inside near the middle was group of six stamps from India. It's interesting how you can tell sometimes that something is old. The colour, the style, a bit worn around the edges. These stamps were old. Old doesn't necessarily mean valuable but it helps.

Two hours and forty-five minutes on the internet and I'd learned these stamps were listed from values of $500 to $16,750 for a pink stamp with a picture of King George V. Easily $20,000 for the bunch. It did cross my mind that maybe I should track down the original owner, but now it was three months later, they were from another city and I couldn't even remember which one of the six store I bought this moleskin notebook from.

Maybe it had been an old lady who collected stamps or travelled to India. I could just imagine her putting the stamps in the book as a safe keeping spot, maybe she'd been thinking that would be the last place a thief would look or maybe she didn't want her children or grandchildren to have these after she was gone since they hadn't visited her in years.

All I know is that they are up for auction in November and I'm booking a plane for India the week after .....