I could say in my “in my teens” but it’s more meaningful to say “30 to 40 years ago” there were few things I enjoyed more as a young nerd than finding a first- or secondhand bookshop and browsing it for several hours on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon; quite a lot of my library of slightly foxed and yellowed pelican and penguin paperbacks come from that era, and more than a few textbooks too.

But it’s having a toddler which has brought me back to sourcing large numbers of books for cheap:

THAT’S NOT MY $CREATURE! ITS $BODYPART IS TOO $TEXTURE!

– not to mention the obligatory Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler library which every small child must own; finding that you can mass buy them for £3 (+ bulk discount) each as opposed to 7 or 8 quid new, greatly de-risking the eventuality of your child shredding pages or vomiting Weetabix onto it.

But where this has led is a selection of arcane queries looking for cheap copies of stuff that I should have read for £25 in the early 2000s, again now at about £3 each.

It certainly doesn’t have the sensual appeal of a room with creaking floorboards and cloistered with overloaded shelves; but it is a bit like a candy shop.

But I still don’t understand where the profit margin comes from, given the cost of postage.