I don’t know if it’s the same for you but my books gang-up on me. Oh they look innocent enough sitting there picking their dust jackets, but before you can say bibliography – and usually when I’m writing – they, over my shoulder, threaten my lap top and persuade a heavy biography to jump off the top shelf onto my unsuspecting head.

When that happens the ringleaders have to go!

And I can always tell who they were.

Those little photographs on the spines always give it away.

There’s Laurence Olivier looking into the middle distance as ever. Was it him? No, much too theatrical. The stoical Lord Salisbury? Shouldn’t think so, not in his old Tory nature. Lloyd George? Maybe. Shakespeare? Well not on his own, he always needed a bit of encouragement. Hang on a minute. There’s the culprit – Professor Stanley Wells, trying to hide on the inside back cover of his hefty biography of Shakespeare, looking all academic and innocent.

But believe me I soon found out the truth after squeezing him between a Gore Vidal and a Stephen King for a few minutes. The blighter had put the other Shakespearean hacks up to it.

So into the Tate Gallery plastic bag he went, along with cohorts Michael Wood, Harold Bloom, and Anthony Holden, plus a few other worthless hangers-on, for the long walk to second-hand oblivion.

Stratford has always had some good second hand bookshops, with perhaps the most famous, The Chaucer Head Bookshop, still very much in business and now owned by the rather avuncular Richard James, who smiles a lot, and actually makes you feel welcome. Perhaps someone should tell him that second hand bookshop owners are supposed to be as miserable as sin, utterly resentful of customers, and must not, under any circumstances sell, or worse still ( horror of horrors) buy books. Surely there must be a course Richard can go on to teach him these necessary skills?

The Chaucer Head Bookshop was established in Birmingham in 1830, but in 1958 the then owner, Dorothy Withey, a short, opinionated, and very determined elderly lady, who probably invented the rules by which second hand bookshop owners should operate, moved to Stratford and opened the present shop in Chapel Street. I got to know Dorothy quite well back in the 1960s when she agreed to order for me, on a monthly basis, the Everyman Pocket Edition of the complete works of Charles Dickens, at ten shillings a copy. I remember she even smiled once.