m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Via @StanCarey: the Guardian reports on what flies on and off the shelves of Oxfam used book shops.

Brown, who has sold more than 81m copies of The Da Vinci Code worldwide, has been revealed as the most donated author to Oxfam’s 700 high street shops. With just four books to his name – although his long-awaited fifth The Lost Symbol is published next month – Brown did well to see off competition from John Grisham, author of more than 20 and the second-most likely writer to be ditched in a charity shop by readers.

But as secondhand bookshop shelves flood with battered editions of Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress, Brown can comfort himself with the fact that he’s also Oxfam’s second most bought author: there are, apparently, still readers out there who have yet to follow the adventures of the dapper symbologist Robert Langdon. There’s no such consolation for Grisham, whose legal thrillers fail to make Oxfam’s bestseller charts at all.