Our local ESRA branch runs the second-hand bookshop in Or Akiva. We started in February 2008. All our committee members take turns to work in the shop - open every weekday from Sunday to Friday, 10am to 12noon. We are based at the Meir Panim center for deprived families in Or Akiva, and the bookshop also serves as Meir Panim’s collection point for donated clothes and food deliveries. To be absolutely honest, we do struggle from time to time with the smell of recently delivered foodstuffs and bags of clothes and items of furniture blocking access to the bookshelves. It is also a center for ex-prisoners who frequently meet each other, smoke and take umbrage when we ask them as kindly as possible to move. At Pesach it is chaotic; in fact, the week before Pesach we have to close the shop to make room for the huge deliveries and the hundreds of food parcels. Ilanit is the somewhat manic manageress who runs the Meir Panim branch like a head-teacher on speed; she is a little intimidating. 

We have about 3,000 books and in the course of a year we sell around 2,500 books. Some weeks we do well, others we do less well, but last May, with the sale of a single notable book, we did very well indeed.

During the winter Marion Fredman took a delivery which included a rather worn book called The Art of Warfare by Sun Tzu. As a general rule of thumb we find it difficult to sell old books, especially this one, a rather strange treatise on warfare partly written in Chinese. It also had several letters stuck in it, dating back to World War 2. Marion realized that someone out there might be interested and asked one of our customers, a retired journalist, to have a look. He said we should show it to an expert. It was the first edition of a modern translation, published in London in 1910, and inscribed and dated 1922 by its owner, Alda Hoare of Stourhead. So we decided that I would try and sell it when I next went to London.

I started researching on the Internet and discovered a nice lady at a military history bookshop in Clapham who gave me a bit of background but didn’t want to buy it. She sent me to the auctioneers, Bonham’s. By this time I had tried to read the book, but I failed completely; it is absolutely impenetrable. It was written by Sun Tzu over 2,400 years ago. It was only translated into English in the 19^th century in a miserably inaccurate and partly made-up version and it was not until Lionel Giles translated it that anyone in the West had any idea of the genius of Sun Tzu. So the version handed in at the ESRA shop was a first edition of a book which had a most extraordinary impact on military thinking in the 20^th century. Apart from its influence throughout Asia, it is still, today, recommended reading for all United States Military Intelligence personnel and required reading for all CIA officers.

The expert at Bonham’s offered to put it in the next rare book auction in October in Oxford and suggested it might reach £300.  He also told me that there was a copy of The Art of Warfare on sale on the website of the eminent antiquarian booksellers Peter Harrington Books. Naturally I decided to contact them too. There I discovered an extraordinary coincidence. The former owner of my book, Lady Hoare, had also inscribed the Peter Harrington copy; clearly there was some kind of story here. As I planned to be in London, I fixed an appointment with Glenn at Peter Harrington Books in Fulham Road. 

May I digress here to try and describe the difference between our ESRA second hand bookshop in Or Akiva, with its piles of clothes, boxes of food and occasional shouting matches and the unbelievably elegant setting of Peter Harrington Books with its high ceilings, carpeted floors and oak paneling. No, I cannot possibly describe it. I will leave it to your imagination.

Glenn and I compared the two books, his version and my version. Both were inscribed by Lady Hoare, but his was a gift dated 1934 and mine was her own copy. He pointed out her handwriting in the margin of my book, a note which read: Morning 31^st March 1922. “People used to note when they started to read a book,” he told me, “and again when they finished it, let’s see …” He turned to the back page and there Alda Hoare had penned Evening 31^st March 1922.  Glenn was astonished. Just one day. The letters stuck in the book were from Alda’s cousin Major Henry Burton, written in 1944 and 1945. We wondered how it was that Lady Hoare was so interested in military matters. How had she came across the book - so obscure at that time? I was also curious to know how it got here. Did Major Burton serve with the British forces in Palestine? Glenn was fascinated and had clearly decided to buy it. But first he apologized for not offering a large sum. “To be honest,” he told me, “we haven’t sold the other book, so we are not sure we will find a buyer.” Would £800 (NIS 4,500) be acceptable? Did he need to ask?