IN CAIRO JUNK SHOP

Evening Star, Issue 25676, 27 December 1945, Page 4

IN CAIRO JUNK SHOP

£ls FOR 'JANE EYRE' SHOPMAN THOUGHT IT "SPICE" TALE (From Our Correspondent.) (By Air Mail.) LONDON, December 13. One of our warriors in the Middle East recently spent part of his Army leave ransacking the old junk shops in Cairo. He made some surprising finds Tucked away between tea tins he ferreted out a luxury • edition of Sir Walter Scott’s works, for which the usually profiteering Arab shopman demanded the equivalent of about half a crown. On the other hand, the same merchant wanted £lO for a wooden box with a Scottish loch painted on the lid, and actually £ls for a greatly shop-worn copy of ‘Jane Eyre.’ Inquiry led to the disclosure that such a fancy price as the latter was not due to any belief on the Arap shopman’s part that it was a specially valuable first edition, which it was not, or that ‘ Jane Eyre ’ is a particularly rare literary classic, but solely to the notion that it was a particularly daring and risque work of literary pornography. No amount' of persuasion could shake that belief. He merely concluded that the well-meaning customer was trying to beat him down in order to possess a. really sensational literary impropriety. The same tradesman wanted four shilliusg for a superb nineteenth century pinewood chest.