As Oxfam celebrates its role as Europe’s biggest retailer of second-hand books, four UK Times writers see what used bargains they can find for £10 here.

How do you arrange your books, asks the UK Guardian

'I have a friend who arranges his books generically, with each genre bleeding into the next - science into SF; history into historical fiction. It took him days, but he was a happy man by the end of it. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything is Illuminated, a girl derides her lover for ordering his books by colour ("How stupid") - but the system retains a small but passionate following. One colleague orders her books according to which authors she feels would be friends in real life - regardless of the centuries that separate them.

Myself, after a lifetime of experimentation, I find I prefer the fortuities and disjunctions that arise from eschewing arrangement altogether: my books end up on my shelves according to where I can jam them, which has the advantage of cutting down on random acts of borrowing, as only I know where anything is located.

But if you're not sold on any of these methods, John Crace has some alternative models:

• The literary snob

Old Penguins, heavily creased to denote re-reading, are lined up in rows of orange, black and grey. These can be bought by the yard at most secondhand bookshops, and are a very easy way of acquiring instant intellectual credibility.

• The David Cameron

Books by important members of the new Tory World Order are prominently displayed where they can be seen by everyone. Acolytes can ascertain how close to power they are by the position of their own books.

• The Jeffrey Archer

Shelf after shelf of your own book in every imaginable translation and edition - frequently in multiples of 10.

Come to think of it, this applies to almost ever author I know.

• The 'I'm desperate for a shag', male version

Must include prominent copies of The Golden Notebook and The Second Sex and any dreary rubbish by Ian McEwan lying around to show you are in touch with your sensitive side. Best to hide any well-thumbed copies of Belle du Jour and La Vie Sexuelle by Catherine M under the bed.

• The "I'm desperate for a shag', female version

Doesn't really require books - it's the last thing a man will notice. But on the off-chance you bring someone home who can read, it might be an idea temporarily to lose anything too intimidating by Andrea Dworkin.

Unless you're a lesbian, in which case you might like to put it on the coffee table.

• The kleptomaniac

Easy. You just arrange your books in accordance with the numbering system of the library from which you nicked them".

Skin tight at the National Library?

The LA Times blog reports

"Leather-bound books are always lovely. But when that leather is human skin -- that's creepy, right? But it's not unheard of -- in fact, the practice of binding books in human skin was once common enough to get its own name: Anthropodermic bibliopegy.

It's not done these days, but the books are still around. They surface in museums and can be found resting on library shelves. One (secondhand) story appeared in the blog of the scholarly International Journal of the Book http://ijb.cgpublisher.com/diary:

She describes a book that she picks up in Canberra’s National Library of Australia…she did not find it by accident; she went looking for it…as ‘Finely grained and delicately textured, the colour of the leather binding is a dirty fawn flecked with spots of darker pigment. The pages are edged with gold, as are the margins of the leather where it has been folded over into the inside of the cover. When I open the book, the first thing I see is an inscription, underlined and in a neat flowing hand: Bound in human skin’.

And the book "Aurora Alegre del dichoso dia de la Gracia Maria Santissima Digna Madre de Dios," bound in human skin, is up for sale at Abebooks. Written by Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, it's listed for more than $16,000; it was last owned by an American acrobat-turned-mystic. And according to the listing information, he received it as a gift.

Some say that the practice was popular for court reports of crime covered in the skin of the murderer. But there have been other kinds of books bound in skin, too, including a 1676 French prayer book that's at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. And a human-skin bound ledger was found in downtown Leeds, England, in 2006 -- apparently it was dropped by a burglar. You think he realized what kind of ghastly artifact he was carrying?"

Fred Vargas deserves all her prizes

There's a good reason she keeps winning the CWA's International Dagger award: she's a genius says the Guardian.

"Back in 2006, when the Crime Writers' Association inaugurated the International Dagger - awarded to the best crime novel in English translation - they probably didn't expect that one author would come to dominate the prize. But in the four years the prize has been running, the same author has been shortlisted each year - and has won it three times. That author is Fred Vargas, and she thoroughly deserves all the accolades heaped upon her.

The woman who wrote The Chalk Circle Man (which won this year's prize), Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands and The Three Evangelists is, I believe, one of the most inventive, most interesting and most original crime writers in the world. When someone writes this well about character and place and then marries that to plots that keep you up well after you really ought to put out the bedside light, you know you're in the presence of genius.

Take the opening to my favourite of her books, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands, in which she introduces her most celebrated character, commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsburg. It is cold in the police department and he is looking at the heater, hoping his benign gaze will kick it into action, or get the engineer to arrive quicker. That he believes, as Vargas makes it clear he does, that just a look might expedite this immediately gives you a rounded impression of Adamsburg - and shows you're not in the presence of your usual copper.

There's no getting away from it, Adamsburg is a difficult character to understand, but an easy one to love. He's a strange, bewildering character, possessed by demons that aren't the usual drink or existential melancholy, and a big believer in following his own thoughts and theories. Grubby, detached and instinctual, he inhabits a Parisian netherworld somewhere between Georges Simenon's Maigret books and his romans durs - novels like The Stain in the Snow, unflinching in their depiction of a morally degenerate France.

Vargas has a different agenda, one that mixes modern France with a past it perhaps never had. The first Adamsburg novel to be translated into English, Have Mercy On Us All, featured a town crier; in Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands a killer is on the loose with a trident, while Seeking Whom He May Desire sees villagers convinced a werewolf is at large in their community. That Vargas is a historian and archaeologist by trade bleeds through into her narratives; they are steeped in the past, in mythology and in superstition.

They are also awash in the history of detective fiction. At the heart of the series is the relationship between Adamsburg and his wine-soaked deputy Dangland - a pair who need each other's particular specialisms to solve these cases. No matter how gothic the case, however Gallically strange, the two detectives offer a reassuring mystery staple - the classic mismatched cops.

And that, finally, is where Vargas's genius lies: she understands the fundamentals of classic crime writing, but is unafraid to put her own warped spin on proceedings. In doing so, she keeps her readers with her through the darkness, through the bizarre turns of events. It also helps that she has, in Siân Reynolds, a translator who deeply understands the terrain of her novels. The difference between the David Bellios-translated Have Mercy On Us All and the more understated and supple version that Reynolds has produced for, say, The Chalk Circle Man is marked - despite their exceedingly French atmosphere, Reynolds never once makes you feel that you're missing out on the subtleties of the original.

Thanks to this sensitivity, we get to see Vargas's fictional world with clarity. It's a place that's dark, brooding, menacing, yet punctuated with dark humour and rays of humanity - and a visit is essential for all who care about great crime writing - or just great writing in general".

Mortification Writer's Stories of Their Public Shame

A book blogger and author reports "One of my favorite books of all time is an anthology called Mortification: Writer's Stories of Their Public Shame. In it, authors like Margaret Atwood, Carl Hiaasen, Chuck Palahniuk and Michal Ondaatje tell stories about their most humiliating public speaking engagements. In one, Rick Moody looks around at those gathered for his book reading and realizes there was only one attendee who "hadn't expelled me from her uterus." In another, John Banville was approached by a potential customer in Miami who said, "I'm not going to buy a book, but you looked so lonely there, I thought I'd come and talk to you."

One of my own most humiliating moments was during the promotion for my first novel, Burning The Map. My publisher called, asking if I would make a "big appearance" at the opening of a super store in South Bend, Indiana. The store was on the campus of Notre Dame, which, they said, would tap right into my college age demographic for the book. There would be "massive PR" around the opening, I was told. I agreed and on the appropriate Saturday drove off to South Bend, where I found not a super store, but rather simply a grocery store. My big appearance took place at a card table in the frozen produce section. I sat there, shivering, near a large stack of my untouched books. Thankfully, I was approached by a woman writing sci-fi romance. Her book was forty pages long, she said, and she was ready to publish it. I counseled her for about an hour on the publishing business and then she left without buying a thing. The manager took pity and bought ten books for me to hand out, but no one wanted them, they just wanted directions to the chicken nuggets. Finally, still trying to make me feel better, the manager showed me the "massive PR" which consisted of a tiny photo of me in the coupon newsletter, right below an ad for .25 cent green beans".

The "literary monster mash-up"

The latest trend might still be in its infancy, reports the UK Bookseller but it’s picking up steam fast: the “literary monster mash-up”, as identified-and spawned by-small US publisher Quirk Books.

"It all started because editorial director Jason Rekulak had a hankering to publish a “new and improved” version of a literary classic. “I made a list of classic novels and a second list of elements that could enhance these novels-pirates, robots, ninjas, monkeys and so forth,” he told Publishers Weekly. “When I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had my title and it was easy to envision how the book would work.”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, interspersing Jane Austen’s text with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action", was published in April and became an immediate online hit, film rights were fought over and, according to Quirk’s publicist, it has now sold over 50,000 copies in the UK and 600,000 in the US.

Hmm, that was out of the blue, says the books world, sensing a wagon to clamber aboard. Grand Central in the US took the “who’s got the biggest cheque book” approach, luring PP&Z (co)author Seth Grahame-Smith for a reported half a million dollars to write the storyof Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter. UK publishers weren’t slow to follow suit: this October Hodder publishes Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, as reported in The Bookseller, in which the Queen protects her empire from werewolves and their ilk, while Orion has I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas lined up for the same month.

Quirk, meanwhile, has moved beyond vampires and zombies, announcing this week that it would be interspersing Sense and Sensibility with sea monsters: “'The family of Dashwood had been settled in Sussex since before the Alteration, when the waters of the world grew cold and hateful to the sons of man, and darkness moved on the face of the deep,” Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters begins. “The Dashwood estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the dead centre of their property, set back from the shoreline several hundred yards and ringed by torches.” Colonel Brandon suffers from “a cruel affliction . . . he bore a set of long, squishy tentacles protruding grotesquely from his face, writhing this way and that, like hideous living facial hair of slime green . . . Otherwise, he was very pleasant.” Mr Willoughby meets Marianne when he saves her from a giant octopus attack... It remains to be seen whether the literary monster mash-up will be a flash in the pan . . . or could it become the "quirky history", or "mis-mem" of 2010?"

Ten of the best failed literary couplings from the Guardian

"'The Merchant's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer

January (an old, saggy-skinned man) marries May (young and "fresshe"). When bedtime comes, and her husband requires his "plesaunce", the poet flinches from what eventuates. He won't tell us whether she found it "paradys or helle" - but she runs off to make compensatory love with the youthful squire Damyan, up a pear tree.

Possession by A S Byatt

Poet Randolph Henry Ash has an affair with poetess Christabel LaMotte after a gruesome honeymoon night with his wife, Ellen. Ellen recalls the horror of "the naked male, curly hairs and shining wet, at once bovine and dolphin-like, its scent feral and overwhelming". His adultery seems excusable.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

"Leisured American" John Dowell elopes with the fascinating Florence. On their wedding day they set sail for Europe "in a great gale of wind - the gale that affected her heart". Her doctor suggests that "I had better refrain from manifestations of affection". But Dowell discovers she has been carrying on a vigorous affair with his friend.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Lessing's heroine Anna thinks she has found a good man when she meets Nelson, an American communist who speaks out against Stalinist oppression. But "he took me into his bed and then I knew what was wrong. I asked him if it was always like this ... Then he said he had a mortal terror of sex." Poor Anna.

More here

Odd book title

The Romance of Cement. Edison Portland Cement Company. Livermore & Knight. 1926.

Not yet in any Australian library according to Libraries Australia.

Some overseas holdings here.