PsychoBabel and Skoob recycle knowledge. We have nearly 85,000 books in our London shop and 98,000 additional books online. Together, we offer a unique, high-quality environment for academic book-buying.

Owned and managed by an ex-academic and staffed by experts in a range of fields, we strive to preserve and develop the second-hand bookshop tradition of making available academic texts from all disciplines. We do not have piles of identical textbooks nor publishers' remainders. What we offer online and in the shop is a carefully selected and prioritised range from our one million plus titles in the Oxfordshire warehouse.

PsychoBabel began in 2003 when a hospital university department was discarding nearly 10,000 titles, admittedly dated, but still of relevance and potential interest to postgraduate study. The name is an amalgamation of the dominant disciplines of that collection, Psychiatry and Psychology, and the biblical cosmopolitan city typified by a confusion of languages.

Our aim always has been to try and facilitate learning by preserving, cleaning and marketing out-of-print, scarce and otherwise unavailable books, and while we've branched out from the psychology focus in our collection, surely the point of study is to de-mystify and decode esoteric and obscure terminology for the phenomena of our existence.

We undertake to try and find one more user of the books we acquire.

Skoob has been an institution in the London Secondhand book trade for thirty years. Founded by staff from the pending closure of Poole's on Charing Cross Road, Skoob's series of shops around Holborn and Bloomsbury were always favourites for the local academic community, businesses, commuters and international tourists. During the 1980s and 1990s there were branches in four countries and a thriving publishing arm. Changing markets led to a two year closure from 2005-2007 and a change of ownership. However, Skoob has bucked the trend of closing bookshops and, together with the internet trading of PsychoBabel, continues to develop its reputation as one of the world's favourite bookstores.

We gather books from large-scale library clearances, domestic reorganisations, academic retirements, sad bereavements, career changes and general lack of space. We've also bought the stock of over a dozen closing-down bookshops in the past few years. Given that our major costs are rent and rates, we aim to get the best use of our storage by pricing to sell, at least 50 percent discount on RRP in the shop, and lower than anyone for comparable quality in the UK online. We're continuously topping up the shelves to the extent it would be impossible to know what we have with a great degree of accuracy in London. In Oxfordshire we add over 1,000 books a week to the catalogue. For quality it's the content that's important. We have some books that are still in shrinkwrapping, but many more that have been carefully handled. We even have some that have been treated with an excess of affection and personalisation by a previous owner (carefully and accurately described, of course). But that's not to say there's a disadvantage in purchasing well-loved second hand books.

In his Irish Times column, Flann O'Brien explored the concept of commercial pre-reading of worthy books. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune. "Professional book-handlers, he wrote, will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners."