By Simone Sekers

As I push open the bookshop door I know immediately whether it is the kind of shop where surprises lurk. If every book is beautiful and has its own plastic cover, I know there will be nothing for me and I murmur an apology and leave. There may well be a first edition of Colette, or Virginia Woolf in those wonderful Hogarth editions, but they have been discovered already and priced accordingly. This is an antiquarian bookshop, and I am a second-hander.

The kind of shop that draws me in may have a cat asleep in the window, shedding fur all over the Shell Guide to Dorset. No one will have turned round the Closed sign on the door, and the comfortable figure at the desk will be reading something from stock, listening, perhaps, to Jazz Record Requests on Radio 3. We'll nod briefly to one another and, after scanning the shelves at eye level, I'll begin a creaking descent to my knees to browse the bottom shelves. It'll take me some time to lever myself up again, so I'll be thorough in my search. In this way I've found such treats as Margiad Evans' Autobiography, and many a battered 'reading' copy of Mrs Henry Wood's absorbing novels of Victorian small-town life. The Vicissitudes of Evangeline by Elinor Glyn, in faded red cloth, Ordinary Families by E. Arnot Robertson (faded and battered blue ditto), Amaryllis at the Fair by Richard Jeffries (with one of the best descriptions of a good potato's ability to suck up gravy ever written), have all been bottom-shelf discoveries, as was a whole set of Constance Holme (The Lonely Plough, Trumpets from the Steep) in the usefully portable Oxford World's Classics edition. Portability is a quality much missing from today's bulky paperbacks with their embossed covers. One of my favourite finds was Frances Towers' Tea with Mr Rochester as a slim Penguin, published in 1952. It has grease stains on the cover and a bookseller's label on the flyleaf: 'M. Dargaud, Kiosque a Fleurs, Cote Sud, Place (illegible), Lyon'. I can imagine the purchaser buying it to read on the train back to Paris, slipping it into her bag together with a croissant or two (cause of the grease stains). During the journey she (I don't think it was a he) would have been rendered oblivious to everything but Frances Towers' elegant writing, totally absorbed by her characters and living with them in the beautiful rooms they inhabit.

I don't think we second-handers know what we are looking for. I have only ever found books serendipitously. My husband whispers, 'Why don't you ask them if they've got a copy of . . . ? ', whatever it is I have expressed an interest in reading. Fatal. I never ask. I don't know, until I see It, what It is I want. I certainly don't want a helpful assistant bearing down on me offering 'to get a copy' for me. The thrill of the chase is that I find It for myself, in an edition that predates Virago or Persephone, and that It belonged to a previous reader or readers who enjoyed It as much as I will. We are a fellowship of long-gone phantom readers; their taste matches my own. When I am gone I hope the books will reappear on the bottom shelf to be enjoyed all over again.

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