Is Oxfam harming bookshops?
By Chris Koenig 8:30am Thursday 27th August 2009 Some say there is nothing so good as the crisp smell of new books. But these days, it seems, many of us find the musty fusty smell of old books even better. Oxfam, which opened its first bookshop 22 years ago in Oxford’s St Giles, has become the third largest bookseller in the country, and Europe’s biggest High Street retailer of secondhand books. Collectors of used books are a growing band; I can vouch for this as someone who has been collecting Oxford World Classics, published by Oxford University Press, for nearly ten years, and has seen their prices all but double. Oxfam’s first national book festival, Bookfest, in July, resulted in a 40 per cent rise in book donations and an increase of sales of more than ten per cent. The charity’s list of the most donated and top-selling secondhand books features the usual suspects. The top five most donated authors to Oxfam are Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ian Rankin, Danielle Steel, and Helen Fieldi
