In the UK, the Publishers Association reported that 2020 UK book sales, notably fiction and audiobooks, rose significantly, with consumer sales up 7 per cent on 2019, despite bookshop closures.

And it wasn't just new books. Penguin Classics sales of War and Peace went up by 69 per cent, Don Quixote by 53 per cent, Anna Karenina by 52 per cent, Crime and Punishment by 35 per cent and The Count of Monte Cristo, which was seen as "locked down readers empathising with the most famous locked up figure in fiction", by 24 per cent.

'Plague' books were popular. The Plague by Albert Camus by 1,500 per cent and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year by 4,000 per cent. Unfortunately, these classic titles were usually bought online, as bookshops were closed. In 2020, in France bookshops were seen as "essential" and remained open, but in Britain they closed.

The British Booksellers Association appealed in vain to the Government, arguing that in the time of a pandemic, "bookshops were lanterns of civilisation and, for many, beacons of hope".

Trade sources have estimated that before lockdown nearly 50 per cent of British book sales were through Amazon. Shaun Bythell , who owns Scotland's largest second-hand bookstore, The Bookshop in Wigtown, "Scotland's National Book Town", prominently displays a Kindle that he shot in his shop.

Both he and Dr Martin Latham reaffirm the values of books and bookshops.

Latham's The Bookseller's Tale (Particular Books $35) is an entertaining collection of stories about books, bookshops, libraries and literary and personal reflections.

Latham begins by referencing the 800-year-old tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Fontevraud Abbey, near Poitiers in which she is portrayed reading an open Bible, from which Latham extrapolates "the story of humanity's love affair with books".

His chapter headings are eclectic including "Booksellers of the Seine", "The Mysteries of Mediaeval Marginalia", "Organised Funkiness. New York Bookshops", "Book Pedlars" and "The Strange Emotional Power of Cheap Books". The book is chock-full of bibliophilic anecdotes, some old, some new.

During World War II, the WH Smith bookshop in Paris was staffed by the Gestapo. "Imagine the customer service, "Latham comments. When at Waterstones, High Street, Kensington bookshop, he recalls Princess Diana browsing alone amongst fiction and books on psychology and spirituality.

He remembers with affection his time at a bookshop in London's Kings Road run by Sally Slaney and Leslie McKay, the latter well known for her Woollahra bookshops in Sydney.

McKay's father's ashes, "in a nice heavy box", propped up the art books in the window. Francis Bacon and Anthony Hopkins were regular customers, their conversations, Latham notes, "unlocked the valves of feeling".

At Waterstones in Canterbury he was delighted to unearth a Roman bath under the bookshop floor and persuade Umberto Eco to spend a day selling books in the shop, including some of Eco's own without ever revealing his identity.

The Bookseller's Tale, with its shifting subject focus, replicates the meandering structure of secondhand bookshops. Shaun Bythell, who calls himself "Scotland's grumpiest bookseller", has provided in Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops (Profile $14. 99), a short addenda to his two bestselling books, Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller.

In fact, it turns out to document eight kinds of people: Peritus (The Expert), Familia Juvenis (Young Family), Homo qui maleficas amat (Occultist), Senex cum barba (Bearded Pensioner), Viator non tacitus (The Not-So-Silent Traveller), Parentum historiae studiosus (Family Historian), Operarii (Staff) and Cliens perfectus (Perfect Customer).

He detests customers who, whistle, sniff, tutter, haggle, fart, hum, expect to drop their children off as if it was a childcare centre and deposit erotica books in the railway section.

Bythell, more often than not, seems to like the people he buys books from over the ones he sells to, or, as revealed in his earlier books, the people he works with.

In the chapter on staff, he highlights student intern Mary who is doing an MA on "The impact of male death on William Faulkner's female characters 1929 to 1936", which, he believes, means she will never have "a lucrative career".

Bythell concludes, however, with the words "without lovers of books I would have no business".

Lesley McKay also reflects on her experience in Sydney, "People want bookshops...A suburb is very impoverished without its bookstore".