The joys of secondhand bookshops

Secondhand early modern books very recently picked up in London bookshops:

M Dorothy George, London life in the eighteenth century. One of those classics I've never got round to reading. I make the excuse that I'm not a London historian. (One of many, varied excuses for not reading what I ought to be reading.)
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of manhood in early modern England. Looks a promising addition to the growing corpus of research on early modern masculinities. A whole section on disorder and violence, huzzah.
C V Wedgwood, The king's peace.

Also a nice varied haul of crime and other fiction: Val McDermid, Sarah Dunant, Alison Lurie, Margaret Atwood, Henning Mankell. Yum. (Although these books are one of the real reasons why I don't get round to reading things I'm supposed to.) And some cookery books.

I'm back in Aberystwyth for the weekend. Not so many secondhand bookshops as London (!), but there are some small treasure houses (Ystwyth Books being an old favourite). OK, I like new books too, and I buy far too many of them as well. But the pleasures of secondhand book shelves never cease. Partly the lure of bargain-hunting, partly the appeal of the unpredictable and unexpected.