The other week someone at The Times had the bright idea of calling in Oxfam to clear the office of all the books clogging our desks, cupboards and corridors. The charity, which has 130 bookshops and flogs £1.6 million worth of stock a month, expected to take back about 20 bags. But within the first hour it had collected 65. In the end it left with 20,000 volumes.

I’ve found myself repeating this staggering statistic to various people in subsequent weeks as an illustration of (a) our chaotic working conditions;

(b) the futility of sending books to newspapers with a view to getting publicity; (c) the inanity of publishing books at all and; (d) what to do with unwanted books. But some of the responses have been surprising, not least the friend who remarked that she disapproved of donating books to Oxfam because it was “killing” the second-hand books industry.

The argument — which seems to have become the official line of the trade, with one shop owner even claiming that “Oxfam is the Tesco of the second-hand book world” — is irritating on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First, the second-hand books “industry” is no such thing: it makes nothing, invests little in writers or publishing, gives little back to writers or publishing and I’m sure that many of those who actually create the work would rather the money generated from secondary sales went to charity.

Second, leaving aside the question of whether Tesco is evil or not, Oxfam exists to overcome poverty and suffering around the world, whereas Tesco’s mission statement, according to a Google search, is “creating value for customers to earn their lifetime loyalty”. Not quite the same thing.

Third, while I’ve never been seduced by the romance of second-hand bookshops — windows foggy with condensation, the musty smell of old cardboard and leather, Sunday afternoons spent licking and sniffing the spines of Evelyn Waugh first editions etc — I see no reason why Oxfam bookshops can’t fulfil such fetishes. Fourth, I don’t subscribe to the view that anything independent is intrinsically good, and that chains are intrinsically bad: you need only to remember that Stock, Aitken and Waterman ran an indie record label to realise this isn’t the case.

Fifth, there are many reasons other than Oxfam why only 1,500 second-hand bookshops remain in Britain: the rising cost of renting shops, accelerating health and safety culture, leading to the removal of “unsafe” ladders and shelves, failure to compete with cheap online booksellers, the rise of the coffee shop as a hangout, and, dare I say it, windows foggy with condensation, the musty smell of old cardboard and leather, etc.

In short, we should let the independent second-hand bookshop sector fade away, which brings me to the most annoying thing about those who seek to defend this dying institution: it is symptomatic of our inability to let go. As a society we have become addicted to preservation, for the sake of it. Nothing, no matter how small, inconsequential or irrelevant, is unworthy of being mourned, celebrated and being subjected to attempts at reincarnation.

We saw it with Woolworths — which should have been put out of its misery years before it was. We saw it with Rover, which was mourned so intensely on its inevitable demise that we attempted to revive it as MG Rover, with disastrous results. And we see it every day on social networking sites.

Type the phrase “save the” into Facebook and you’ll discover online campaigns now afoot to preserve everything from the gollywog to the vinyl record, the pint, the mullet, the Vespa, The O.C., the transit van and the old version of Facebook. Some of these things aren’t even at risk of dying. Meanwhile, the papers are full of examples of people attempting to preserve things that should be allowed to go the way of the dodo. Last week, for instance, we had the news that, after the demise of Polaroid film, because of the superiority of digital photography, two entrepreneurs had bought the machinery from Polaroid’s film factory and were planning to bring instant film to market next year (why not bring witch hunting and Glenn Medeiros back while you’re at it?).

Then there was the bizarre outpouring of nostalgia for Chas & Dave on the news that they were splitting up. (Judging from the coverage, you’d have thought that the pair had been regularly headlining Glastonbury in recent years, rather than playing the Chicken Shed Theatre in Southgate.) We also had the BBC presenter Chris Packham getting into trouble for daring to suggest that “giant pandas should be allowed to die out as they are stuck in an evolutionary cul-de-sac”. But he’s totally right. As the writer Alan Beattie put it in his recent book, False Economy: “Panda apologists will tell you that the bears are endangered because humans are encroaching on their locale, but their real problem is that their incompetence at consuming and reproducing makes them hopelessly vulnerable. Pandas eat almost exclusively bamboo, which helps to confine them to a narrow habitat and puts them at immediate risk from any change. Bamboo is in any case so low in nutrients that they have to spend up to 16 hours a day chewing it — the equivalent of trying to subsist on sugar-coated cardboard. Finally, they are so bad at mating that pandas in captivity have to be shown panda pornography to get them to perform . . . Pandas are useless.”

The evolutionary point is a good one: death is a necessary part of progress. If the dinosaurs were still rampaging the Earth, we human beings would have had no chance.

And while I can with some effort see the point of trying to preserve a few fading institutions — good manners and local newspapers among them — we should allow independent second-hand bookshops to disappear, along with the Cornish language and Cliff Richard.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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