A second hand bookshop where clutter is an art form

Most times when I visit Glasgow University Library I make time to go to Voltaire and Rousseau's. They are a second hand bookshop 5 minutes from the library. The proprietor, Joseph McGonnigle, I've known (as Joe), since 1971.

The University Library has thousands of books, arranged neatly on shelves, catalogued and cared for. Voltaire and Rousseau's, which is the size of a small supermarket, also has thousands of books, some on shelves, and nearly as many on the floor. They are piled at times three deep up to three or four feet high. Looking down the book aisles is like looking at one of those 1950's disaster movies with special effects showing the aftermath of a San Francisco earthquake, with skyscrapers leaning crazily in all directions and threatening a domino effect collapse in the event of an aftershock. So first time visitors should probably do the basic health and safety training, wear a hard hat and luminous yellow waistcoat, and stay near the exit point. Och only kidding – it isn't as bad as that – but it is impressively chaotic, as you can see. The glorious photo was taken by J Malky, see more here. .

The books are in a rough kind of categorised arrangement. As you come in the door, Theology is at the far right hand corner, poetry is middle left, philosophy is middle aisle half way down, and Scottish stuff faces you as you go in the door. Roughly speaking, in general terms, on a good day, when due allowances are made, you can find the section you're looking for.

Today I came back with some spoils. Because whatever else, this is a shop where bargains are still found, and those odd "never thought I'd get my hands on this", kind of books can be discovered, even if not where you thought it might be. Of course one person's gold is another person's dross. But here's what an hour's digging produced.

The Confessions of the Church of Scotland. Their Evolution and History, C. G. M'Crie. (Edinburgh 1907) £3.50. One of my heroes is the Rev James Morison of Kilmarnock who along with John McLeod Campbell, did so much, at enormous personal cost and spiritual sifting, to compel the Scottish churches to rethink and restate the doctrine of the atonement in terms less thirled to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. In these Thomas Chalmers Lectures M'Crie is an eloquent and sympathetic guide to the post Reformation spiritual history of Scotland.

Only One Way Left, G. F. MacLeod (Iona Community, 1954) £1.20. Aye, George Macleod knew how to tell a story too, especially the story of the Kirk and its need for constant renewal, reformation and reconstruction. These 8 Lectures were the Cunningham Lectures and they contain much of Macleod's pastoral and liturgical theology, written with outspoken passion. They are fuelled by fearless intellectual fire that energised a ministry of preaching, imagined communal renewal and informed half a century of theologically principled protest against nuclear weapons.

Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, P. T. Forsyth. (London: Independent Press, 1964) £0.60 pence. I know Jason. Surely Jim already has this book. Yes but this is a clean copy and anyway it cost me more to park my car for an hour! And nobody gets to walk away from a P T Forsyth book because they grudge the cost of an hour's parking! I'm off at meetings in Birmingham and Oxford later in May – this cheaply priced preacher's tonic will provide the spiritual verve needed to recover both energy and equilibrium. Forsyth's lectures on preaching, like so much of his work, helps me find again "the soul's magnetic North".

A Gathered Church. The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930, Donald Davie, (London: RKP, 1978). £2.50. Davie is a poet I first encountered as the maverick literary critic who took seriously the poetic achievement of classic hymns by Watts and Wesley. In his volume Purity of Diction in English Verse, he opened my eyes to the lucidity and leanness of Augustan English, and showed how well it serves the theological and rhetorical purposes of Watts and Wesley.

He also edited the Oxford Book of Christian Poetry, and had no embarassment including hymns from Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, John Newton, and James Montgomery. The introduction to the volume is one of the best apologia's in print for the hymn as poem, and an enthusiastic rebuttal of all those literary snobs who look down their noses at hymns, especially evangelical hymns. Though what Davie would have made of the modern praise song is quite another matter, and whether many of them will ever be anthologisable (new word?), I doubt. Deeply and pessimistically, I don't think so.

But to lift the heart again after that brief moan – Total cost for the four books £7.80. Worth wearing a hard hat for, eh?