Truth be told, I have never bought anything from The Haunted Bookshop. Perhaps this is because it is not, if you'll forgive me, one of my chief haunts: I always seem to forget that it's there on the way to G. David or Market Square or some other destination, and just brush past it. Perhaps it is a matter of pricing: at this time in term, when most of us attempt to throttle back on our spending and retreat into a tepid austerity before May Week, £8 for even a little old out-of-print A6 hardback requires a bit of justification.

But The Haunted Bookshop, situated on the same sidestreet as the Indigo Café and the Corpus Playroom, is one of Cambridge's most enigmatic and enticing curiosity shops. It is absolutely tiny, smaller than my room in college, but it makes the most of its impressive surface area-to-volume ratio. A bookshelf forms every wall, and another bisects the floorspace. Barely-controlled chaos prevails. Any grand design or plan is well disguised: beyond one shelf which seems to uphold the great tradition of English poetry, and its neighbour, home to particularly large and valuable artefacts, it is very difficult to predict where a title should be. This is not a plea for more organisation; in fact, this random architecture of dusty spines is one of the many things that gives The Haunted Bookshop its appeal. No spare inch has gone to waste, and yet you know that they would always have room to stock more, even if it means squeezing Aristotle in beside Beatrix Potter. As the lady behind the desk, overseeing my fruitless browses, noted: “You can never have too many books.”

Only in the last week have I become a regular visitor, if not customer, no doubt leaving many a fingermark on many a page. Places like this force you to make some pretty agonising choices, like leaving behind a beautifully compact, two-volume edition of Milton's poetry, the price as eye-watering as the font size. That's probably unfair: The Haunted Bookshop houses a lot of antique, hard-to-find treasures, rarities that have increased and will continue to increase in value. Of course, the best reason -perhaps the only good reason - to buy a book is to read it; it is a pleasing bonus if it should turn out to be a financial investment.

But as for the real, nagging issue of this secondhand booksellers, I can only give secondhand report. 'Why is it called The Haunted Bookshop?' I asked the lady behind the desk. “Because it's haunted”, she replied. “A woman in Victorian dress comes down every night after closing time, and smells the violets.”

I did not enquire about the violets , but I had noticed a roped-off staircase, twirling up to a higher level, piles of books resting on the lower steps. Harry Cochrane