I stumbled across a disturbing scene the other day after spending the morning pursuing the Dalai Lama.
Following the rumpus outside the Sheldonian Theatre, involving a protest group called the Western Shugden Society, I popped into Blackwell's and levitated to the second-hand section on the third-floor.
I soon spotted something I had to have — Kipling's Thy Servant a Dog — a first edition from 1930 complete with dust jacket.
The price — £12.50 — brought me down to earth with a bump but as I was buying the book as a present for my mother, I wasn't too bothered by the price.
Paying for the book took a while because there was a queue of students at the counter cashing in their well-thumbed Oscar Wilde textbooks.
At first I felt outraged on behalf of one of the nation's finest wits. Would he have penned The Ballad of Reading Gaol if he knew he would be treated so rudely in years to come?
But perhaps the students were only selling their compendiums of literary criticism and not Wilde's work itself, and therefore I have to forgive them, for I probably did the same thing myself many years ago.
There was even one old boy in the queue trying to sell off a few textbooks from his days as a young blade in the 1950s. He managed to sell a couple of books, but his other offerings were rejected and he left looking thoroughly disillusioned with adult education.
A Penguin 60s collection of Roald Dahl stories, which cost me 49p in Oxfam in Turl Street, has gone down a treat. I visited the store after watching staff put on a colourful fashion show in Broad Street to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Broad Street shop, the first charity shop in the country.
My final recommendation for the time being: Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street, originally written as newspaper columns for The Scotsman.