When I was in London last week, one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road had excerpts from this article taped up in the window. What was once a thriving district of expert booksellers (such as Marks & Co from Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road), is slowly being eaten away by the West End’s vastly more profitable theatre culture - restaurants and wine bars and, obviously, herbal remedy practitioners. A visitor to London, I am not intimately acquainted with every bookshop in the area, but I know a vacant business unit when I see one, and I know that Charing Cross has a history that is being desecrated. Turns out that the housing association that owns much of the retail space in the area is forced to prioritise profit over culture, and the remaining second-hand bookshops are also facing closure - even those in the gorgeous Cecil Court, rumoured to be the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books.

When I read the Guardian piece in that shop window last Friday, I naturally abandoned all previous resolve to stick to my budget of £1.74, and bravely withdrew £10 in order to keep the second-hand book industry afloat in the South East. It’s a tough job, etc etc.

Several of the remaining shops have cheap outdoor shelves, which serve as an indication of how they price their stock indoors. Some of the Cecil Court bookshops are quite specialist, and have outdoor stock for four whole pounds - can you believe it?! - so I dared not venture inside those for fear of spending all my dinner money.

Henry Pordes Books Ltd, at 58-60 Charing Cross Road was an immediate hit though. It’s a maze of little interconnected rooms, with encyclopedias from the dawn of time only a few staircases away from the dirt cheap paperback fiction that dings my dong. I filled my arms with goodies by Ali Smith, Douglas Coupland and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but then got the fear about not being able to eat and put everything back save a copy of In The Beauty Of The Lilies by John Updike. I adored Updike’s Rabbit books recently, and this is described as “an epic, elegiac masterpiece” about four generations of a New Jersey family, so I instantly forgave the fact that the title doesn’t make sense. Also, I just looked up ‘elegiac’, and apparently it either means it’s really really sad, or it’s written in something called “dactylic hexameter”, so there is already an enticing aura of suspense around the entire novel.

Then I went a few doors down to Quinto, at 48A Charing Cross Road. This bookshop is operated by the same people who run the Cinema Bookshop in Hay-On-Wye, but it seemed sadly under-stocked last week. Even so, I picked up Updike’s Bech: A Book, which is apparently the first in a trilogy about this dude Henry Bech, and unprolific writer with a whole address book full of mistresses. For some reason it’s got an artist’s impression of Updike on the cover, next to a disproportionately tiny picture of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Maybe it was his way of communicating with the world that when he died he actually wanted to be embalmed on put on public display like Lenin.

Two mentions of Lenin in as many posts. You’ll all think I’m a closet Commie. I had a McDonald’s last week though, fret not.

John Updike - In The Beauty Of The Lilies
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £2
Bought from: Henry Pordes Books Ltd, London

From the synopsis: “…transcendence, higher reality, immortality, resurrections…”

John Updike - Bech: A Book
Publication date: 1973
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: 25p
Price now: £2
Bought from: Quinto, London

From the synopsis: “Henry Bech, American Jewish writer of international repute, has not written for five years and knows it only too well.”

Don’t forget: You can write to Mark Field MP to encourage him in his quest to save the booksellers of Charing Cross.