FORGET Blackwell’s and Waterstone’s. Don’t even bother with Oxford or the other charity shops. The place to buy books these days is Poundland.

A month or so back I snapped up two rather expensive books that I was delighted to find at the branch of the chain in Abingdon.

To digress, I was unaware until recently that there was a branch in Abingdon. Setting off on a shopping trip one day we were about to board a number 4 bus in Botley Road until Rosemarie remembered she needed Poundland wild bird nuts for which, since Abingdon didn’t have a store, we’d have to go to Witney, which we did.

The next day we learned, very graphically, that there indeed was a store in Abingdon with reports of a fatal stabbing on the premises at the very time we could have been there.

But back to books. The ones I bought were Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20), about her years with her husband, the playwright Harold Pinter. This helps to transform him – through his preposterous political posturings principally – into rather a comic figure. But Lady Antonia’s book does contain much of interest, to which I may return another day.

My other book was Well Done God, Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson, edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Gordon (Picador, £25).

I considered this a real find since I had just finished reading novelist Coe’s excellent biography of Johnson, which charts the career of this wildly experimental writer – famous for his book with a hole in it so readers can see what happens next.

Though admired by the literary world, including Samuel Beckett, Johnson was a commercial failure.

A dipsomaniac, he ended up committing suicide in 1973.

It is ironic, to say the least, that this reprint of his stuff should end on the shelves of a bargain store because no-one would buy it anywhere else.