5 things I like about second hand books

1. I'm reading a really good second hand book just now. I don't mean the story - which is good and quirky and I'm glad I'm reading it - but as a second hand book, it's really has everything you want. People often go on about the smell of books. It's a thin line though isn't it? Some second hand books are honking and god forbid you've had a smoker as a previous owner. There's a middle ground though - a smell that says 'I've got character, I've been around, I've done my time in a home or two and in a bookshop or two'.

2. There's something good about seeing a price printed on a book and remembering that there was a time when 95p was the same to a reader of a new book as £8.99 is to me. And that £8.99 will be the same as £17.99 to a future reader. Someday.

3. I like what you might find inside a second hand book. Often it's nothing, but sometimes there's an inscription, though the person that would part with an inscribed book is no one I would like to know. On horrific occasions it might something disgusting, you never want to - as my mum once did - open a page of library book to find a perfectly preserved and pressed second hand bogie. But sometimes there's just a little something, that let's you know this book has been read and enjoyed by someone else.

4. I find a rummage in a second hand book shop takes you on a far more enjoyable journey than a new bookshop. I get readers block when I walk into a four floored Waterstones without a clear idea of what I'm buying. But faced with a few shelves of discarded fiction, I take more chances, more chords are struck and the purchases seem to matter more. It's good to remember that the newness of something is not always its strength.

5. This book has the lot. It's cost 95c in 1965, I have no idea where I picked it up, but I liked the sound of it, knowing nothing about Saul Bellow and took the chance. It smells old but not bad and as I turned to the back page I found, written in pencil a line from page 19. It says "indignation is so wearing that one should reserve it for the main injustice".