In November, we are usually twiddling our thumbs. We've had the boost of the half-term holiday, and people are saving for Christmas. It's our worst month, and I have 17 years of accounts to prove it. What you are seeing today is a fluke."

On a gloomy, damp Wednesday Les Ward is shining, unexpectedly. He has sold more than 80 titles by lunchtime. Everything from a train book, Raised on Steam, to Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, five Evelyn Waugh novels bought by a silver-bearded collector, and 10 Mills & Boons, at 20p each, selected by one of Les's regulars, a stooping elderly woman with a walking stick.

His Romance section has an enduring popularity. It's alongside Culture and Older Classics, so next to Hemingway, DH Lawrence, George Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Virago's feminist literature, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, are Reasons of the Heart, The Defiant Debutante, The Sheikh's Unwilling Wife, His Royal Love-Child, and Take Me Twice – "some in Romance are slightly more explicit, but nothing to frighten the horses. We're a family shop and you have to be tactful," says Les. He takes traditional values to an extreme. Try and imagine a retailer, or any business these days, without a phone (landline or mobile), never mind a computer. Maybe there's a book to be written on how he succeeds without technology in his Pickering premises, a converted terrace house across the road from the station of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

"I like to see customers coming through the door. If they didn't I wouldn't be here. For me, human contact is the only way to sell, and a ringing phone is a distraction from the shop's atmosphere.

"At any one time I have around 20,000 books either on the shelves, or upstairs in the storeroom, and on average I'm selling and replacing about 10 per cent every week. Keep freshening your stock is my rule. I don't need a computer to tell me what books I have, or where they are. I know.

"I'm not interested in mail-order or the internet. All that postage and packaging? No thanks. Customers have to physically turn up.

"We're open seven days a week, and there's a helpful lady here when I'm
away looking for new material. The attitude in some second-hand bookshops infuriates me – a grumpy, or pompous owner doing the crossword and listening to classical music who turns up his nose at requests for who-done-its and popular authors. Recognise the type?

"The public is interested in all kinds of books and my aim is to try and meet that demand, within the boundaries of decency, at a reasonable price. Nothing here costs more than £3, including hardbacks. You want a Mary Wesley? Like John Grisham, I find she's not so popular these days, so she's over there at £1. In Oxfam you'd pay £2.99."

Who and what else is in or out? "Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler and Edgar Wallace still have their followers, and those lovely old green or orange-covered Penguins are a sure sign of quality. In Westerns you still can't beat Zane Grey, and among newer authors
I'm selling a lot of Simon Kernick and Sophie Kinsella."

As if on cue, a few minutes later 24-year-old Kate Bennett from Goathland takes possession of Kinsella's Shopaholic & Baby. "I relate to her books," said Kate. "What woman wouldn't want a shoe room?"

Les doesn't delve that deeply into a book's merits, but he has an instinct for what brings customers in. His sections and their content reflect the huge diversity of escapism and a desire for knowledge: Victor Hugo, cookery, poetry, gardening, film, sport, travel, biographies, real-life crime, science fiction, military history, and a well-worn thesaurus, to Beano, Dandy and Rupert the Bear annuals. The previous week Les sold more than 20 Beano books. Sometimes they're even for the children.

He breaks off to sell The Fishing Tackle Catalogue, published in 1989, for £1. But for a few water-stained pages, he might have asked an extra 50p for that. Then Salmon Fishing in the Yemen finds a
new home.

Among a newly-acquired pile awaiting his perusal is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, an edition published by Penguin in the late-1940s at 1/6d. Ward doesn't know if it will be read, but he's confident it'll sell.

"No problem shifting that. Someone will buy it as a 'prop' for the area's next war-themed weekend. Old books are in demand for period events. Always happens. Nearly everything has a value
to someone."

In these hard times that also applies in another way. More people are bringing in books to sell, which previously they would have donated to charity shops. "It's one small indicator of the recession. For some folk struggling to make ends meet, it's a way of raising a few extra pounds, and for me the bonus is that sometimes there's a nugget in their box or carrier bag."

Locally, it's not the only change in the second-hand book business. One of Ward's colleagues in Scarborough is quitting next year, and another, Cobweb Books in Thornton Dale, closed recently. The couple who ran it for 11 years have retired. They hoped someone would take it over, but despite interest no-one could raise the money in the present climate.

Ward is fortunate. A loyal clientele and book-buying tourists are still out there, and with a product that brings pleasure for not much more than a few pence, he's more recession-proof than most.

Others provide a helping hand too. "TV programmes always give books a new lease of life. Agatha Christie is as popular as ever thanks to Poirot and Miss Marple, and who remembered Flora Thompson until the BBC dramatised Lark Rise to Candleford earlier this year? Suddenly, because of the telly, I was selling more copies of that than I'd done in my previous 16 years in the shop.

"It's the same with Bill Oddie and his Springwatch show.

"I'm already looking out for nature and birdwatching books because come next spring, they'll be flying off the shelves again thanks to him. Once the series is over, that'll be it for me and natural history titles for another year. Some books are like that. Star Trek isn't selling right now, but Doctor Who is going well. So is Brideshead Revisited because of the film and the Castle Howard connection, and there'll be even more interest in Henning Mankell when his Swedish detective reaches a new audience on TV."

Some, though, have a diminishing shelf-life. At £2 there are no takers for Bill and Hillary, the "sensational bestseller" about the Clintons. If they'd reached the White House again it would have been a different matter, but if they don't sell soon they'll be moved on
from Pickering.

Turnover demands it, and Les Ward needs the space. The Obamas are the story now.