I buy used books the way other people buy snacks: impulsively, often in threes, and usually when I’m meant to be doing something else. This site is the record of that habit turning into a room.

I’m Alex Bell, 42, ex-copywriter, pencil behind the ear, fold-up bag in the pocket “just in case.” I live inland in Spain in a half-finished house that echoes when it rains. Marina is my partner — Valencian, teaches art at a secondary school, allergic to clutter and strangely tolerant of mine. She reads crime novels in the bath, corrects my Spanish gently, and calls the spare room la biblioteca with a straight face. When I turned a plant stand into a table, she looked at it, looked at me, and said, “If you put one more hardback on that, it becomes modern sculpture.” I did. It did.

El Rastro, Madrid, 7:40 a.m.: tarps come off tables; coins click in someone’s palm; the first sun hits a box of paperbacks and the top one curls like a crisp. A seller with nicotine fingers and an Atlético keyring says, “Mira, este es bueno,” which it isn’t, and I smile anyway. I buy three, regret one, carry the stack through the heat like a small, daft trophy. On other weeks I work Valencia’s backstreets — around Mercado de Ruzafa, a shutter goes up, a box appears on the pavement, and somebody says they were “just about to bring it inside.” That’s usually where the trouble starts.

I’m not a collector. I’m a reader who likes books that have lived: names on the endpaper, tram tickets as bookmarks, pencil lines where somebody fought with the author and sometimes won. I’ll mend a hinge, wash a dust jacket, and stop before “improving” becomes erasing. If I sell something (to fund the next mistake), I price it fair and let it go.

How posts work here, roughly: one book I found — where, how much, why I couldn’t leave it — then whatever came with it (a note, a smell of old glue), one thing I learned that week (repair, sourcing, valuation, or a way to read without wrecking the page), and the daft bit I did anyway (wrong edition, misread signature, bargaining beyond dignity). Spain threads through the lot because it opens shelves I didn’t have before, and because the Biblioteca Nacional de España keeps tempting me into rabbit holes I didn’t plan for.

What I’m good at: quick scans without missing the quiet treasure; gentle repairs; walking away when it smells wrong (mould lies; humidity lies louder). What I’m still learning: Spanish trade quirks (a “primera edición” that isn’t), cataloguing without falling into the perfectionist well, and how to decode “perfecto estado” on Wallapop.

There’s a battered commonplace notebook for lines that won’t leave me alone and a shoebox of index cards for threads — shop owners, inscriptions, tiny local histories tied to addresses that no longer exist. Some days the posts are pure field craft (how to triage a damp box safely; how to spot autopen; questions to ask before you cross town for a too-neat listing). Other days they’re people: the retired teacher who sold me half a shelf and saved the other half for her granddaughter; the letter in a dust jacket that made me ring a bell I didn’t mean to ring. Marina wanders in and out of these stories with a mug, an eyebrow, and the occasional “No more boxes… this week.”

Rules, loosely:

• buy deliberately, until you trip over the rare thing — then don’t overthink it
• fix what helps; leave the honest scars
• sell a few, often, so the room doesn’t harden around you
• write it down before sleep steals the detail
• keep one book you’ll never sell, even if it makes no sense on paper
• and if a stallholder says “mañana,” believe them — but check again anyway

 

If you’re here for technique, you’ll get some. If you want story, that’s the spine. If you like the second-hand trade from the side door — cash-only stalls, trasteros that smell of the 90s, and the odd miracle in a junk shop — you’re in the right place. I’ll try not to waste your time; when I do, I’ll count the cost and share the lesson.

Start anywhere. It all shelves together.