Walking through the iron security gates, through the revolving doors, and into the airy, arty entrance hall, I felt very much like an outsider; a small, young nobody, summoned to the Big City, out of the provincial comfort zone that is University Life. A scene from a film flickered in the recesses of my mind: Emerald City. We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of OZ…

But, into the offices, and everything was normal, down to earth and friendly. I was working for Essie Cousins and Lizzy Kingston, who both quickly made me feel at home and useful. I even had my own office. I got to write some cover copy for the paperback edition of Patrick Bishop’s Bomber Boys, create a couple of press releases, and update their audio book reviewer database. The variety of tasks kept me occupied and interested, and I was grateful they did; I would not have been able to keep up the commute from Oxford to London every day if I hadn’t enjoyed what I was doing.

I was intrigued and quite amused by the meetings to discuss cover designs because they were so similar in their method and discussion to our own group meetings at Oxford Brookes. I had imagined that in the Real Publishing World I would discover how these things were really done, but I guess, after all, we all work in much the same way. It’s reassuring; it feels like an organic process.

On Friday afternoon, just a week after the phone rang, I said goodbye the man at the front desk and walked out through the revolving doors, out through the iron security gates, and out onto Fulham Palace Road. I didn’t feel so much like an outsider anymore. I hope that they were happy with the work I did while I was there; I wouldn’t mind coming back.

Income: Negligible.

Habitat: Charity bookshop.

I scan the shelves; weave around rival customers in the confined space. Hungrily I take stock of today’s offerings; the shelf is sign-posted ‘All Books Only 99p’.

After careful scrutiny of the available titles, I decide on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a novel concerning racial and sexual tensions in South Africa. I have been the verge of reading it for years. This is what charity shops are for: they’re for the books you always wanted to read, but can’t justify buying yourself when they’re hot off the press. They are for those spontaneous choices of titles you’d never heard of before. They’re for the people who love seeing who else has already scribbled their name inside the front cover, and how many decades ago. For the people who love the faint smell of dust as much as the fresh smell of new paper and glue.

Back at home, my housemate and fellow publisher sees Disgrace lying on my bed. ‘I read that book,’ she says, ‘I don’t like it. It’s so horrible; the bit with the dogs’.

Disgrace won the 1999 Booker Prize— I’m a little behind the times, but this novel still feels current. It is a good read; a thought-provoking read. There is something unnerving about the 3rd person narration that pervades the book. But more unnerving still is that I find I am not so horrified by the episodes concerning the dogs, which are put down in vast numbers and carted off to the incinerator. I know I should be but, like the protagonist, having never seen much cruelty or neglect first-hand, I find myself distanced from it, made callous. What does sink in is that all the characters of the book are disgraced, in one form or another: by society, or by self-infliction, or in the eyes of the omniscient reader. By the close of the book, Coetzee has slowly revealed this state of disgrace in all. I feel disgraced.