I ran out of milk yesterday afternoon (due in part to the moreish qualities of new Cheerios Oats), so I went around the corner to the Co-op for more. Obviously it's impossible to travel a hundred yards down the road for cow juice without having a look in the charity shop opposite, so I soon found myself in the Kemp Town branch of Marie Curie, where I immediately noticed these...


As it happens I've been wanting a pair of bookends for the past fortnight, ever since I bought a shoe cupboard from Lidl (don't ask) and decided to store DVDs on the top, so at 3:54pm I bought them for £6.99. I hadn't actually wanted to spend more than three or four pounds (Jobseekers Allowance doesn't go as far as you might think), but I didn't know how much they were until the assistant had climbed into the window display to retrieve them, and was standing there balanced on a jewellery stand, giving me a look which said 'buy these or die'.

So I handed over the cash and returned home to tell Lisa I'd been the victim of a charity mugging and had been bullied into paying way over the odds for two pieces of junk. She tried to console me by telling me they were "quite nice". I could tell she was lying.

As it turns out though, my tireless charity work has paid off yet again. The bookends are marked 'Sigma' and 'B Kliban' which, despite being a regular viewer of Bargain Hunt, meant nothing to me. A quick search on the internet however, revealed that B Kliban was an American cartoonist famed for his cats, and Sigma a US ceramics company who, like Kliban, were around in the 80s but have since died a death.

It wasn't long before I found a teapot from the same Sigma/Kliban range selling for $325, but the real find came with the discovery of an identical pair of bookends (albeit in slightly better condition) currently up for auction in America with a reserve of $125.

So the question is, do I use them to hold up DVDs on a shoe cupboard, or put them straight on Ebay?