Christmas never fails to make me nostalgic, so whilst visiting my parents for the holiday season I took the opportunity to stroll around the leafy suburb of north-west London where I grew up, seeing what had become of my childhood haunts. Imagine my surprise to find that a second-hand bookshop that a younger me had frequently scoured for old Michael Moorcock novels and other fantasy treats was in the process of closing down. "30% OFF END OF LEASE SALE", proclaimed the hastily-printed signs that had clearly been worked up in 15 seconds in Microsoft Word. Since this represented both my last opportunity to delve into the place to hunt for hidden treasures, and the greatest change to occur in the display in the shop window for the decade that I have known the shop, I went in.

The very act of entering the shop, of course, required both an unprejudiced eye and a great deal of luck on my part. It is not an inviting place. The paint is peeling from the storefront, the wares on display are tired-looking, faded, and do not appear to have been chosen with any great care; perhaps a keen collector of left-wing pamphlets documenting clashes between various leftist groups and the British Union of Fascists in the East End of London during the 1930s, for example, would find the shop display tempting, if they can make anything out through the gloom and grime, but otherwise the items on display in the window are a sorry lot, often in poor condition, and would languish there year-in year-out (like much of the stock on the shelves inside, in fact).

The luck factor comes in when one considers the unusual opening times of the establishment in question, which like the window display, and indeed the shop itself, are arranged according to no discernable logic whatsoever. The owner of the store eschews the convention of opening the store during the standard six days of the week and closing on Sunday, and simply opens it for three or four days a week. Which three or four days those would be seemed to change on a weekly basis when I frequented the place. Nor did the owner feel obliged to be bound by the advertised opening hours; if he felt like giving up and slouching off partway through the day, then he would do precisely that.

But surely being grim and inaccessible couldn't have caused the store to lose its lease! The ideal shopkeeper should make every customer who walks through the door feel special, and what better way to achieve that end than making being able to walk through the door in the first place a rare and joyous event? What better way to inspire customer loyalty than to present a dour, joyless face to the world, so people have to look carefully to work out whether you are open or closed - you may not attract many passing custom, but those few intrepid souls who do venture inside can comfort themselves, as they wind through the mounds of dust and erratically-arranged bookshelves and teetering piles of paperbacks, with the fact that they are among the elect, the chosen few who happened to chance past on one of those rare days when you could be bothered to open the shop at all.

Another positive quality exhibited by the bookseller in question is his cavalier disregard for the accepted logic and customs of stocking and managing a book shop. For example, the corporate drones of Waterstone's and Borders would have you believe that your average book shelf has a finite capacity; that there comes a point where you simply cannot cram any more books onto it. This is simply not true, as anyone with a to-read pile the size of mine can attest; however, so cowed is the bookselling industry that even many second-hand booksellers insist on limiting the books on each shelf to those which can stand neatly in a line, running from one end of the shelf to the other, like a row of helpless prisoners before a bloated corporate firing squad.

Not so our merchantile champion. In his store, the only limit to shelf capacity is his boundless imagination. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the fantasy/SF section. On most of the shelves, the books are double stacked, so behind one rack of books you will find another rank of books. Any extra space on the shelf itself is occupied by a book. Furthermore, there are two rows of books in front of each shelf lined up on the floor, kept in place by two smaller shelves that are, again, stuffed with books. On top of the two rows of books on the floor there are large, teetering piles of books, reaching up unto the heavens. This arrangement means that browsing the SF section is like playing a strange hybrid of Jenga and Tetris; not only do you have the problem of removing enough books that you can access the lower shelves without having a mountain of hardbacks fall on you, but you also have the problem of replacing everything afterwards, preferably without creating a deathtrap for the next unwary customer. It's great fun - literally like digging for treasure!

The arrangement of the shelves, too, has been carefully thought through. Here, a simple principle has been followed: in each segment of the store, the owner has installed the maximum number of bookshelves that the room in question can possibly take whilst still comfortably allowing customers access to enter the room, browse the shelves, and look at the books. Having reached this point, the owner then throws in another half a dozen shelves. Only the agile and quick-witted can peruse this store with ease. The SF section is contained in a narrow gap between the main area of the store and the general fiction section, rendering the Jenga-Tetris game even more fun because you have to stop and put everything back in order to let other customers through (on those rare occasions when there are other customers in the shop). If you go into one of the back rooms you do so in the full knowledge that if one of the shelves in the connecting regions collapses it will be completely impossible for you to escape, and you will have to survive by eating mouldy pages from poorly-maintained Stephen King paperbacks and licking the condensation from the grime-brown window while the fire brigade dig you out with specialist book-mining equipment.

But this just makes the loss of the lease even more baffling. What better way to keep a book shop in business than ensuring that browsing the books is a lengthly and difficult process that occupies most of an afternoon? Precisely whose comfort should be prioritised here - the customers, or the books? Clearly, one's first duty is to the inanimate objects under one's care.

You may wonder how the esteemed monarch of this magical literary kingdom maintains such a massive and diverse range of books - precisely how does he manage to keep his stock levels so high? The development of EBay means that most people who are inclined to sell off their second-hand books can do so for far greater renumeration than the store ever offered, although the bookseller did manage to maintain a reasonable rate of intake through the simple process of not giving a shit about what he stocked. One might think that three or four towering piles of mid-70s Conan reprints (wherein Robert E. Howard's original stories were drowned out by execrable pastiches from editors L. Sprauge de Camp and Lin Carter) or Michael Moorcock collections or Gor novels would be enough, but no - so long as there is a few cubic centimeters to spare, there's always room for more books.

But the real trick in keeping a large collection of books on the shelves - and around the shelves, and on the floor, and piled up unto the ceiling - is ensuring that the rate at which books are removed from the shop is kept as low as possible. The obscurity of the shop and the difficulties in exploring it do their part, obviously. Ensuring that there are great piles of worthless crap obscuring the real gems of your collection also helps. But the crucial part is the pricing policy - make sure the books are expensive for what they are (for example, £3.50 for a Fighting Fantasy book where someone has written all over the character sheet and scribbled in the margins seems reasonable), and once you have priced a book never, ever, ever compromise; part of the reason that the "30% Off End of Lease Sale" sign was so startling to me was that I had previously thought only the end of the world could prompt the place to have a sale. After all, if you have a shelf of twenty not-at-all-rare paperback books in poor condition priced at £5 and you only sell two in a week, that's better than if you have a shelf of twenty similar books priced at £2 each and you sell sixteen in the same time, isn't it?

Ah, the damn lease. I still can't figure out how they lost it. There wasn't any problem with the customer service after all; the shopkeeper understood that not all customers are equal, and adjusted the respect and esteem in which he held them accordingly. Leave empty handed and you would hear a dark muttering behind you. Buy something - or try to sell the guy something - and he would examine the books with a faintly snooty air, as if the items were as unworthy of his attention as - well, as you really. The only time I have ever seen him crack a smile and engage in jolly conversation was today, during the closing down sale. The stress of the lease ending must be getting to him.

So, when one considers the placement of the shop (in a fairly dull high street in a quiet outer London suburb), the uninviting exterior and erratic opening times, the disorganised mounds of crap obscuring what decent stock may be available, the discomfort and difficulty involved in shopping there, the undiscriminating acquisitions policy and ruinous pricing habits, and the sour attitude of the shopkeeper, I can't think of any reason why the shop would have failed beyond the machinations of a Scroogelike landlord, or maybe the mystic effects of the credit crunch.

And that's why we can't have nice things.