If entering such shops today can feel somewhat like a rearward timewarp, back then it felt as if we were re-entering the present. In the days before the internet, the network of secondhand bookstores, with their dusty piles of Western magazines on the floor, was like a cable between East and West, past and present: Mad magazine; Empire, the movie magazine; two- and three-week-old Sports Illustrated issues to keep us up to date on the NBA and NFL seasons; Ebony to tell us what was happening in rap and hip hop. When my father was posted back to Europe a few years later, I didn't feel too far behind the times.

If the internet and cable television have closed the East-West gap in Pakistan, Islamabad's secondhand book stores are still good for one thing: rare books. In Pakistan, of course, "rare" means something different from, say, Edinburgh, or my old home, Northampton, Massachusetts. Rarely do you find, for example, Saul Bellow in any of the mainstream outlets in Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad. So when I entered a serious Bellow phase, I went from secondhand store to secondhand store, finding Dangling Man and The Victim in one, Augie March in another, and, after several failed attempts, a beautiful copy of Herzog in a store that I hardly ever visit, which caters more to readers of plays and 19th-century classics. Other unusual finds have included a collection of Kenneth Tynan's dazzling profiles for the New Yorker, Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and, perhaps strangest for me personally, a novel by my old professor and mentor in Massachusetts, Sabina Murray.

"Rare" here can also be for the puritanical factor. This adds a delicious buzz to browsing those dense, dust-covered piles and shelves. In the Book Corner, where Rushdie novels lie discreetly under the counter, I've found a copy of Catherine Millet's explicit memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, and a July 1964 issue of Playboy, with a beautiful spread on Brigitte Bardot in the middle pages.

Which brings me to the best of the lot, my favourite secondhand trophy: it's another Playboy production, this one a first edition of a collection of the best Playboy interviews, whose roll-call of subjects includes Miles Davis, Bertrand Russell, the legendary jungle doctor Albert Schweitzer, a medicine man of another kind in Timothy Leary, Nabokov, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa the month before his disappearance, James Earl Ray nine years after he shot Martin Luther King, and many others. The conversations are extensive and remarkably frank. Given the list, one doesn't really need to cite the content of the interviews to convey how beguiling this book is. It may not be, for the local sensibility, as indecent as the magazine itself. But it's a demonstration of the unpredictable encounters in these little asylums of words and ideas, in a city which has for most of its 50 years felt like an isolated island dominated by an austere bureaucracy — but where, perhaps for the wrong reasons, people from around the world still come for one- or two- or three-year stints, leave something behind and, I'm sure, take something back.