Second-Hand

For second-hand bookshops have a special aura. It's not just the book - it's what you might find scrawled in a margin, or hidden between the pages; it's the name you can almost read on a flyleaf. It's the book still in good condition but that has clearly been well-loved, that you can imagine has already been passed from hand to hand before it reached you, that you might love too. It's not a first edition, no, but something that's been hard to find until you stopped, by chance, into this second-hand bookshop, and were suddenly glad that someone had been generous enough to send a beloved book out into the world again.

Erica Wagner on the magic of second-hand books in The Times.