On Why You Should Buy Secondhand at Christmas

Poets & Thieves Quality Secondhand Books boasts the most potential Christmas presents per square metre than any other business in the world. From Douglas Adams to Zola and everything in between (except Haruki Murakami - he tends to sell out as soon as we get our paws on him), our shelves are stuffed with high-quality literature from around the world and even beyond.

Where does it say that a gift must be brand-spanking new? Age and use cannot alter the content of a classic book. If anything, it heightens the experience to know that someone's eyes, many years ago, have predated your own as they wind through a novel. It is in many senses a shared experience - you and the previous owner sharing the secrets of the author together, maybe not at the same time, but perhaps in some cosmic, metaphysical sense.

Because a used book costs less than a new book (unless it's collectible), your money goes further here. You can literally can get three secondhand books for the price of one new book. Not only that, we're not beholden to publishers or shareholders and as such, our rigorous book selection process is based exclusively on quality of material rather than marketability, packaging or popularity. When people bring their books in for us to purchase, we run our trained, impartial eyes over the pile and pick out only the best (sometimes the odd history of 60 Minutes c. 1981 will slip through the cracks but as we get more experienced, this is happening less and less.) What this means in practice is that almost any book you buy from here - while it may have a creased spine or the pages might be slightly brown - has passed our stringent quality testing process. We're like an exclusive private school - so many owners have applied to submit their books for sale that we need to put them on a waiting list, and even then there is no guarantee they'll merit a spot on our shelves.

One key consideration you should also be making this Christmas is whether or not you're going to support the ravenous destruction of planet Earth by buying a new book. Studies have shown that authors and their publishers are directly responsible for the vast majority of the global warming phenomenon: for example, 73.45% of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed in recent years to facilitate the publication of the Harry Potter series - a series that we, for this reason, refuse to stock. You can rest assured that we here at Poets & Thieves Quality Secondhand Books have never killed, maimed or inconvenienced a tree, let alone a whole forest. Yes, our books came from trees originally, but if more and more people read the same copy of a book, then that tree's death at the hands of Penguin or Faber & Faber will not have been completely in vain.