I don’t know how Freud would have interpreted them, but for more than 30 years my happiest dreams have been of second-hand bookshops – shops previously unknown to me or old familiar shops that I am revisiting.

It is the familiar shops which have certainly never existed – I have come reluctantly to that conclusion. Somewhere not far from the Gare du Nord in Paris I have vivid memories of a shop at the end of a long street running uphill, a deep shop with high shelves – I had to use a ladder to reach the top of them. On at least two occasions I hunted through the shelves, but when the war was over I searched for the shop in vain. Of course the shop could have disappeared, but the street itself was not there.

Then there was a shop in London that occurred very frequently in my dreams – I can remember clearly its façade but not its interior. It stood somewhere in the region behind Charlotte Street before you come to the Euston Road; I never went inside, and I am sure now that there never was such a shop. I would always wake from such dreams with a sense of happiness and expectation.

At various periods of my life I have kept a diary of my dreams, and my diary for last year contains six dreams of second-hand bookshops. Curiously enough, for the first time, they are not happy dreams – perhaps because a loved companion with whom I used to hunt books, and with whom I began to form, just after the war, a collection of Victorian detective stories, died at the end of 1971.

So in one of these dreams an old railway book which I am planning to give to my friend John Sutro for Christmas (he founded the Railway Club at Oxford) has lost half of its cover: even the old red Nelson sevenpennys (so unaccountably maligned by George Orwell, but which I love to possess when the first editions are too expensive) prove to be all mutilated copies. Nothing in any of these dreams seems good enough to buy.

My friend David Low’s recollections as a bookseller have set my thoughts rambling, not only through dreams but through the small adventures and friendships of 50 years of book-hunting. At 17, I became a wanderer in Charing Cross Road, which alas! now I seldom bother to visit.

Second-hand booksellers are among the most friendly and the most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen. There is the musty smell of books, and there is the sense of the treasure hunt. For this reason I prefer the badly organised bookshop where Topography is mixed up with Astronomy and Theology with Geology and stacks of unidentified books litter the staircase to a room marked Travel, which may well contain some of my favourite Conan Doyles – The Lost World or The Tragedy of the Korosko.

To enter properly this magic world of chance and adventure one has to be either a collector or a bookseller. During the blitz I happened to be a part-time warden attached to the same post as David Low, whom I already knew well, and little Cole, who was in those days a book ‘runner’ (buying books in one shop and hoping to sell them at a profit in another). My first patrol with Cole was in search of a parachute bomb which was said to have become entangled in the trees of one of the Bloomsbury squares. We never found it, rather to our relief.

Cole took me once to see his room – I remember the shabby books stacked everywhere, even under the bed, and we agreed that one day, if we both survived the war, we would set up business together. I went off to West Africa on a different job and we lost touch. I had lost my only chance of becoming a second-hand bookseller.

To become a collector is easier. It doesn’t matter what you collect, you have a key to the door. The collection is not important. It is the fun of the hunt, the characters whom you meet, the friends you make. When I was a teenager, I got my first taste of collecting by buying works on Antarctic exploration – the Arctic didn’t interest me. Those books have all gone. They would have a certain value now, but who cares? Before the war I collected Restoration literature because I was working on a never-published life of Rochester. They were not first editions (I couldn’t afford them); they have gone too – some of them in the blitz and some I regretfully abandoned when I left England.

The value of a collection to the collector lies less in its importance, surely, than in the excitement of the hunt, and the strange places to which the hunt sometimes leads. Quite recently, with my brother Hugh, whose collection of detective stories extends from Victorian times to 1914, so that we usually hunt as a couple, I walked in pouring rain through the dismal outskirts of Leeds in a ruined area that could have been part of a Grierson documentary on the Depression.

The shop we sought had been included in a reliable directory, but we believed in it less and less as we got wetter and wetter between the abandoned factories. Yet when we arrived, the shop had certainly once existed – there was a sign ‘… k-seller’ above a door which was no longer in place, all the windows were broken, and the floor was mysteriously littered with children’s boots and shoes – good shoes too. Some meeting place of a childish mafia? Scenes like that, and the discovery of new pubs and beers one has not previously tasted, are some of the rewards of the bookhunter.

This isn’t the same world as the old-established bookshop in Piccadilly, with its antiquarian section, where I went recently to pass the time, and asked if by chance they had any of the works of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. “What did he write, sir? Fiction?” The new university shops I avoid – all red brick and glass – full of second-hand academic books which were dull even when they first appeared.

Alas, for Miss Dillon’s shop in Store Street, which survived all the bombs, her new premises have not the same charm today. No, the West End is not my hunting ground now any more than Charing Cross Road, but thank God! Cecil Court remains Cecil Court, even though David Low, whose shop used to be there, has moved to Oxfordshire.

From David one happy day I bought a strange 18th century manuscript bound in white vellum with a hand-written title Hultoniana. It cost me five guineas, a lot of money in the 1930s, but I got the price back, after a little research, by writing an article in the Spectator on this bizarre story of a series of cruel hoaxes inflicted on an unpopular tradesman called Hulton, apparently written by one of his enemies.

I have the manuscript still, “grangerised” with an interesting letter on the 18th century London shop names mentioned in it, written to me by Sir Ambrose Heal. It pleases me that in that way Hultoniana cost me nothing but a little work.

Perhaps the find I value most is The Office of the Holy Week, translated by Walter Kirkham Blount, published in 1687 with seven engravings of Hollar and bound in tooled contemporary red morocco. It is dedicated to the Queen of England. “The Queens of England are Saints again,” Blount writes, “and the Fruit infinitely great, when People find the way to Heaven, is the way to be well at Court.”

He couldn’t have written that a year later, with the arrival of Dutch William. He would have had to publish the book abroad, or without a publisher’s imprint at all. This beautiful book cost me half a crown at Mr Gallup’s shop on Clapham Common, one of the casualties of the war – it “went up” on the same day as my house, 200 yards away.

Gone too is the second-hand bookshop I loved in Westbourne Grove and gone the little bookshop on the triangular site opposite King’s Cross Station, where I bought The Adventures and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in their first editions for what seemed then the exorbitant price of £5. That is the sad side of bookhunting – far more shops disappear than new shops open. Even Brighton is not what it was.

From The Word, April 1974