Bernice and I recently ventured into Jerusalem. We had to go for a routine medical test, and decided to live dangerously, and combine the visit with a couple of other errands. One of these was to go to the excellent specialist music store on the main pedestrian precinct, to try to get for Esther’s wife Ma’ayan a book of sheet music for jazz piano. We had seen the book on Book Depository, but we agreed that we should support the privately-owned, specialist shop, particularly as it had only just reopened after lockdown. It is a shop that I love going into – although ever since Michael left home we hardly ever have an excuse to go in. The shop window always boasts a delightfully eclectic assortment of instruments, and the array of acoustic guitars, ouds, with the occasional cello or violin along the walls inside the shop, all softly illuminated from above, always leaves me wondering whether man has ever put wood to more beautiful use than when carving musical instruments.

When I went in, I saw that there were no books or sheet-music on display. I assumed they had all been moved to the upper floor. When I asked the owner about the book, he smiled ruefully, and explained that they no longer stock any books: that entire side of their business has been killed by the internet. He also agreed with me that, if he did not stock it, nowhere else in Jerusalem would. And so, regretfully, we had to order the book online.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernice and I are huge fans of Book Depository, with its frequent discount campaigns, its bargain offers, its no-argument replacement policy for goods that arrive damaged or do not arrive, its charming bookmarks. I even enjoy the fact that books are dispatched separately, as the order is filled: I place one order of a dozen books, I forget what I ordered, and then I get the frisson of opening 12 separate surprise presents, over the space of a couple of weeks.

But (and it is a huge but) Book Depository is not the second-hand bookshop on the corner of the Lower Cranbrook Road and Ilford Hill, where I browsed many miles of bookshelves from my early teens onwards. It was there that I fed my first ‘literary’ addiction, buying, reading and then selling back probably 25 or 30 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories. Google Maps street view shows me that the site is now a children’s clothing store, cramped uninvitingly between Chicken Hut and Dixy Chicken. In the early 1960s, however, it was between a cobbler’s, if I remember rightly, and a haberdasher’s. (For those below a certain age, ‘cobbler’ was originally a pejorative term indicating someone who had no skill. This meaning survives – in stage portrayals of Cockneys, at least – in such phrases as ‘cobbled together’ and ‘a right load of old cobblers’. Later ‘cobbler’ came to be used specifically in the shoemaking trade for someone who could repair shoes but lacked the skill to make them from scratch. Haberdashery is what I believe the ex-colonials call ‘notions’: buttons and sewing thread, sequins and trim, and all of the other paraphenalia of needlework and dressmaking.)

‘My’ bookshop was a place of mystery and hidden treasure. As I opened the door, the bell that hung above it would tinkle lightly, and the owner would emerge, badger-like, from the gloom of the back office. The lighting and ventilation helped to create an atmosphere that suggested the shop had been burrowed out of a hillside.

I think for me the greatest mystery of the place – and of second-hand bookshops in general – has always been the ubiquitousness of Alberto Moravia’s Italian masterpiece, translated into English in the Penguin edition – The Woman of Rome. From 1963 until 1986 (when we came on aliya), whenever I went into a second-hand bookshop, I looked for a copy of The Woman of Rome, and I never failed to find one. I am still unsure what to make of this. Did it indicate that it was an extremely popular book, since clearly everyone owned a copy; or, since everyone was getting rid of it, was it an extremely unpopular one? I can’t offer any answers, I’m afraid. I never actually bought, or read, it.

There are at least four ways in which second-hand bookshops are far superior to Book Depository. First, and most obviously, every book is a potential bargain. Books are among that special group of artifacts whose infinite variety age cannot wither, nor custom stale. (Note to self: There’s a good turn of phrase in there somewhere; must play around with it and see if I can use it again.) As long as all the pages are there, and all of the text is legible, a dog-eared, eighth-hand Penguin paperback copy of Women in Love offers exactly the same glorious literary experience as a signed, hardback first edition.

An added benefit, for the obsessive reader, is that, whereas you might be tempted, having discovered John Steinbeck at age 15, to order online everything he wrote, a second-hand bookshop compels you to space out your acquisitions, buying a new title now and again, whenever one surfaces on the shelves, and thereby avoiding binge-reading. (Incidentally, this also makes it much easier to control your spending!) In this way, I enjoyed The Red Pony, for example, on its own terms, rather than comparing it unfavourably with Grapes of Wrath, as I probably would have done if I had read them back-to-back.

In addition, second-hand bookshops usually strike the perfect balance between order and chaos. So, for example, non-fiction is usually divided into science, history, travel, biography, and so forth, and fiction is arranged alphabetically by author. However, the arranging is done not by computer according to Dewey number, or by banks of data inputters, but rather, typically, by one day-dreaming bibliophile, whose efforts, furthermore, are often thwarted by customers returning books to the wrong place.

What this meant for me was that looking for another John le Carré was not a completely hopeless task, (although I could never decide whether he would be found between D H Lawrence and Harper Lee, or between Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll). At the same time, I always had to cast my net a little wider, in case something I was looking for had been bumped a little from its correct position.

However, on balance, I would say that the greatest advantage of the second-hand bookshop over Book Depository is serendipity*. I cannot easily ‘browse the shelves’ of Book Depository, and, if I do, I am very unlikely to stumble across something that has been misfiled.

In my second-hand bookshops, on the other hand, I have found a few absolute treasures that I had no idea I should be looking for. Almost always, it was the titles that attracted me. One day in the mid-1970s, for example, living in the cultural backwater of Bridgend, South Wales, I came across a title that simply begged to be bought, just to find out what on earth it was. And so I came to discover the utterly absorbing experience of reading Robert M Pirsig’s (the author’s name alone might have tempted me to buy the book) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have seen this variously described as ‘The best-selling philosophy text of all time’ and as an attempt to unify ’holistic, subjective perspective with analytical, objective perspective’. It is part road trip, part philosophical musing. If you had asked me in my twenties whether it was readable, and whether it was worth reading, I would have answered ‘Yes and yes!’ enthusiastically. I recently rediscovered it on my shelves and reread it. Let’s just say that it, or I, or perhaps the world, or perhaps two or more of us, have changed since the 1970s.

It was again the title that seduced me into buying Harlan Ellison’s subversive and notorious overview of American television in the late 1960s, The Glass Teat. Not only was the subject-matter stimulating and thought-provoking, but the direct, vernacular prose was both articulate and immediate. We didn’t talk or write like that in Bridgend in the 1970s, and we certainly hadn’t talked or written like that in Ilford in the 1960s, but it was thrilling and vivid and intoxicating. (Almost all of you know me well enough to be aware that the effect wore off pretty quickly….but for a brief moment there I was of my time.) Unlike ZAMM, which is how we cognoscenti refer to Zen and the…, Ellison’s work is, for me, as fresh as ever. It still leapt off the page and hit me between the eyes with full force.

When I last visited a second-hand bookshop, I did it in style. We took the kids on a roots trip to Britain, in 2013, and spent a few days in Swansea staying with very good friends. Micha’el was, at the time, very interested in shamanism, and had tried, with no real success, to find some books in Charing Cross Road. He had been very impressed by Foyles, but not so much by the limited helpfulness of the staff, and so I decided that I would take him to the shrine of books. From Swansea, we drove one day to Hay-on-Wye, which has become the second-hand book centre of the United Kingdom (and possibly the world).

This small riverside town that lies on the Welsh-English border has a population of about 1500, and boasts over 30 bookshops, some specialist, some general. Micha’el and I split up to visit a few, and then met up again in the largest shop, housed in a converted barn, two floors high, with a soaring ceiling, inspiring a sense of awe similar to what one experiences in the great medieval cathedrals. It was a three-hour round-trip drive, but it was very much worth it just to see the expression on Micha’el’s face when he walked into the emporium, and to hear his enthusiasm when he found an assistant who could discuss with him intelligently the various branches of shamanism on which they had books in stock.

I wonder when I will again get to a second-hand bookshop. There are such shops in Jerusalem; Micha’el even worked in one several years ago. However, unsurprisingly, the bookshops I love are the ones whose stock reflects the tastes of people like me: usually more widely read, and almost invariably more adventurous than me, but close enough to me to be able to stretch out a hand and allow me, by stretching out my hand beyond my comfort zone, to grasp the book that they are offering. Now, if Book Depository could only develop an algorithm that did that, our library would be doubled in size….and our bank balance would be halved. Just as well they can’t, probably.

Of course, a well-rounded life is one that combines sedentary reading with healthy exercise.

*Serendipity: now there’s a word with a fascinating etymology. King Barham V, you hardly need me to remind you, was a Persian king who ruled the Sassanid Empire about 1600 years ago. Around his reign there was woven a fantastical tale, which passed into Persian folklore and was published in Venice in 1557. The book was eventually translated into English as The Three Princes of Serendip (which is the Persian name for Sri Lanka). It tells the story of the journeys of the three princes, who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Enter, around 1750, Horace Walpole, a Prime Minster’s son, the architect of Strawberry Hill House (which was really the forerunner of all the grand Victorian public buildings in England) and the author of the world’s first Gothic novel – The Castle of Otranto. In his spare time, Walpole, enchanted by the tale of the three princes, borrowed the name of the princes’ birthplace to coin the term serendipity, meaning ‘the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance’. (Incidentally, Walpole is also responsible for the first recorded written use in English of over 200 other words, among them: souvenir, malaria, beefy and nuance.)