Waterfields last purchases?

After breakfast at Brothers, our favourite Oxford cafe, I have an hour or so to kill while Linda has her hair cut. Just time for perhaps my last ever visit to Waterfields secondhand bookstore which is closing soon. Never a place that I bought a lot as its main focus was literature and literary criticism, but I always felt it was the most likely place in Oxford to find a copy of William Donahue's translation of Kepler's Astronomia Nova. - I never did though

I always find it terribly sad to go round a bookshop that's closing down. Many of the shelves are now bare. There are boxes of books stacked in corners, destined for other shops perhaps. Though on the plus side, everything still on the shelves is 50% off marked prices.

I bought six books, totalling a little over £20. A.N. Wilson's Iris Murdoch as I knew her (which has already inspired me to watch the movie, Iris, again), Richard Friedenthal's Luther (a huge biography), Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf: A writers life, Timothy Brook's Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the dawn of the Global World (not really sure yet what this is about), Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's Re-scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to his life and work, and finally, Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptious Task (which I am particularly excited about and which I plan to read before starting my course in writing biography in the autumn)

An small article in today's Guardian reflects on a claim made last week that a secondhand bookshop in Salisbury has just closed having attributed its demise in part to the local Oxfam bookstore. Of course the Oxfam shop almost certainly receives all its books by donation, so I guess that is perhaps a competitive pressure too much.

When we first moved to live near Oxford there were a handful of secondhand bookshops in the city. Thorntons on Broad Street was a standout as was the one in the covered market. After Waterfield's demise, there will just be the two Oxfam shops, the upstairs of what used to be the Classics Bookstore and Blackwell's.

Virtually every book I now buy is secondhand via Amazon or other websites. In the last week I have bought about 15 books for a total cost of about £60 including P&P. Though it is sad to see the end of so many bookstores, I probably prefer the efficiency and cheapness of the internet. I have so many memories of looking round secondhand bookstores but, like record stores, I am not really that bothered to see them go.

But very pleased with my purchases from Waterfields. Maybe I might manage one more trip there in a couple of weeks time