"Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books," said Virginia Woolf. "They have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack." Which makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in scientific accuracy; anyone who has ever tried to read a heavily used paperback, the spine broken in several places and its leaves falling gently on the floor would happily forgo some of that one-careless-owner charm. Yet secondhand bookshops certainly have an attractiveness that many retailers of the new cannot beat. How sad it is, therefore, to read this week that independent secondhand booksellers claim they are being forced out of business by Oxfam. Both retailers of used books, their common enemy lies elsewhere. On the one hand, there are those homogenised chains, with their 3-for-2 offers and assemblies of the usual subjects. On the other, there are those small businesses, each different, for better or worse. Again, it is easy to be overly-romantic: former secondhand bookseller George Orwell set part of a novel in a shop that smelled of "dust and decayed paper" with "quarto volumes of extinct encyclopaedias slumbered on their sides in piles like the tiered coffins in common graves". But the best have stock that is old – an out-of-print Penguin on Imagist poets, or a Fontana reader bringing news (at least it would have been in 1981) from the sociological front – and temptingly affordable. They contain treasure, however dusty.