It turns out that Oxford's Central Library at Westgate is the fourth busiest library in the country.

I've been there a couple of times recently and left feeling very satisfied.

The last time I was there I picked up a number of titles by Geza Vermes, who is the world's biggest authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and apparently lives right here in Oxford.

Sitting in the library's ample stores was The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, a 1977 title published by Collins.

More recent titles including The Passion, and The Resurrection, could be found on the shelves in the library itself.

At the weekend, I managed to visit a number of city centre book stores, including my favourite, the Oxfam specialist shop in St Giles.

There I bought a 1936 pocket Heinemann edition of Somerset Maugham's First Person Singular, a collection of short stories. The little green volume smelled refreshingly ancient and set me back £2.49.

A paperback copy of Tom Sharpe's The Great Pursuit was in the same price bracket.

I read quite a few of Sharpe's novels when I was kid, so it will be interesting to see if I still find them as enjoyable.

In the back of my mind is a tall tale about Tom Sharpe throwing a typewriter at my former editor Jim McClure, who is sadly no longer with us.

It's an apocryphal tale that needs further investigation, but I'm sure Jim would not have thrown the typewriter himself, because he liked using it so much.

I also managed a trip to Blackwell's, where I saw in the top-floor second-hand section some lovely American editions of Boswell's diaries, but they would have set me back £15 a piece, so I made do instead with a couple of Graham Swift novels, Last Orders and The Light of Day. It was a tenner for the pair and I haven't yet managed to remove the unnecessary price stickers from the back of the covers.

The bargain of the weekend? A Mingled Measure, James Lees-Milne's diaries from 1953-1972. The hardback cost a pound in Abingdon Library, the county's second busiest. My only difficulty is which newly-acquired book I should pick up first.