I can't help thinking - but then I am approaching old age and old men are predisposed to think such thoughts - that this utilitarian attitude, this inability to understand the joys of serendipity, will lead in the long run to an inability to make and understand allusions and to a loss of mental flexibility.

Browsing is a manifestation of multiculturalism in the best possible sense. By browsing, you realise that what you previously did not know existed interests you deeply. The internet, by contrast, is the instrument of monomaniacs.

Now I begin to sound like a second-hand bookseller I know, a fervent believer in Enver Hoxha's Albanian paradise, who thinks that all forms of modern communication are instruments of the devil - of monopoly capitalism, designed to exploit the common man, who consequently has not a clue about the value (or should I say the price?) of a first edition of Somerset Maugham's first book, Liza of Lambeth.

This bookseller is always furious that his black customers, old women mainly, are more interested in concordances to the Bible than in Hoxha's vituperations against the Titoites (Hoxha had a wonderful line in vituperation). The spiritualist section of his shop is particularly strong, since he bought the entire library of a man who subscribed to the Spiritualist Book Club - the table-rappers' answer to Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club - for many years. Of these volumes, I bought Thirty Years Among the Dead by an American doctor and a slim volume on how to get in contact with your dog once he had passed over to the other side. It was published shortly after the great cull of dogs, a quarter of a million of them, at the beginning of the Second World War, when it was feared there would not be enough food to feed them.

The best place in Britain known to me for general second-hand bookshops is North Wales. There you can pick up the odd volume of sermons by 17th- and 18th-century divines for £5. Of course, I recognise that they are not for everyone. But thanks to my frequentation of second-hand bookshops, I have come to realise that nothing human is alien to me.