Do Charity Bookshops Drive Out Other Second-Hand Bookshops?

Summary

Some years ago I started investigating the common belief among book-collectors that there are fewer second-hand bookshops in the UK than there used to be. As a matter of stark statistical fact, this is simply not the case. Of course, many people will have the subjective impression that it is true, based on their own, partial, experience. They will know of bookshops that have closed, and towns or cities that had several but now have none. No-one is doubting such personal impressions. But they are not the whole picture. The broad profile I have established, using contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories, is that there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955, about 600 in 1966, about 750 in 1973, about 900 in 1984 and in 1995, about 950 in 1999, and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025. At no point does this profile show a decrease. Even if we exclude charity bookshops, the total of all other bookshops has been stable, at about 900+, for over forty years. Could there have been a temporary dip in between any of these periods? Possibly, but I have not seen any evidence of that, and it could only have been small and of short duration given the overall upward trend. The main reasons given for the supposed decrease are the internet, high street rents and charity bookshops. Again, no doubt each of these has had an impact. But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns. But what about charity bookshops? The argument here is that these get their stock and most of their staff for free, and also enjoy tax and business rate concessions. They therefore provide, the argument goes, unfair competition to privately-owned bookshops. In a recent (2 April) article, ‘The problem with Oxfam Books’, for The Spectator, Alexander Larman confidently states: ‘If you’re ever ...