Among junk-shop treasures he listed glass paperweights “that have a piece of coral enclosed in the glass, but these are always fantastically expensive.” Just such a paperweight would be purchased by Winston Smith and become one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central symbols (and a junk-shop proprietor is a crucial figure in the novel). He described the appeal of these shops to “the jackdaw inside all of us, the instinct that makes a child hoard copper nails, clock springs, and the glass marbles out of lemonade bottles. To get pleasure out of a junk shop you are not obliged to buy anything, nor even
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