This isn't the first thing I've read about second-hand bookshops being under threat and one of the reasons for it being charity shops like Oxfam. If it's so, then it's so, and there's not much to be done about it. Charity and charity shops are good in their own right, and the second-hand book trade has to make its way as best it can against legitimate forms of competition. Still, some of us will regret the passing, or even just decline, of the second-hand bookshop if it continues. And there's a philistine element in this column by Sathnam Sanghera, who brushes aside that regret.
Much of what he says is fair enough, and if he, personally, has no time for browsing around such places, that's also fair enough. To each their own. But he might have the breadth of imagination to understand why a collection of books sold on by others has an appeal for many of us, Amazon and Abe Books notwithstanding. It's also not so clever to say that 'the second-hand books "industry" is no such thing: it makes nothing...' Making things isn't the only kind of thing people value enough to be willing to pay for it; doing things also sometimes fits the bill. Finally, the argument that as a society we're too addicted to preservation for its own sake is neither here nor there. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. Those who'd like to see second-hand bookshops surviving have reasons for this other than that second-hand bookshops have a history.
