Brighton is a wonderful place to live. Everyone is young and attractive, the sun is always shining and we have an MP in our very own colour. I’m very reluctant to leave but part of family life is Holidays, The Provision Of, so when Easter arrived we decided on a change of scene and headed off to the seaside. And what could be nicer than a week in Lyme Regis?

Pretty ones all in a row.

Whilst printing off a list of local bookshops from TheBookGuide I rather unwisely had a look at the town’s official website. It looks exactly like a brochure from 1972, but not in an ironic self-referential award-winning Brighton kind of way: more a sort of no; this is actually the best we can do kind of way. Happily the town has been racing ahead of its image for many years. It’s three hours from London, inches from Devon and a season away from becoming the next Padstow. Rejoice – the Americanos have arrived.

Even better news is that there’s not a Costa MegaBucks in sight. At the moment the fossil-coast capital strikes a perfect balance between trad and fab. On the first night we had cod, chips and cava on the beach and later in the week watched the sunset over a pricey cocktail at London restaurateur Mark Hix’s Oyster House. We bought warm bread, ground and baked in the town-centre watermill and filled it with crab from the Cobb. The locals look like pirates and talk like farmers but they seem to have adapted well to the challenges of selling traditional feta, tomato and basil pasties for £2.99 a pop.

And guess how much these ones were sold at?

Mary Anning put the town on the map with her discovery of an ichthyosaur in the cliffs in 1818 and local literary connections range from ‘Jane Austin might have slept here’ to the full-blown ownership of John Fowles, Lyme’s most famous adopted son. I wasn’t here for the literature though – I was here for the books.

A break from a job is one thing, but you can’t take a holiday from addiction. I was twitchy for books by the second day and help was at hand in the form of Lyme’s last remaining proper outlet, Sanctuary Books, my new favourite shop. It’s a delightful treasure trove of a place, a mix of antiquarian charm and middle earth strangeness. There are books balanced on every surface, plenty of prints and ephemera and room after room of reasonably priced stock. There’s even a book lovers’ B&B upstairs, a smart diversification in these straightened times. Best of all despite the computer on the desk and a fairly sophisticated net presence it’s the sort of place where genuine bargains turn up as I soon discovered.

Perched on top of a bookcase was a long row of tiny books, some falling to bits and all covered in dust. The one that caught my eye was ‘Teeny-Weenies By The Sea’ but it had no price in it. Neither did any of the others. This is often a sign that the dealer wants to sell them as a job lot and so it proved. £25 later I walked out fully sated with a box of goodies that got better the more I looked at them.

Barely three inches tall they were all from the early thirties and published by Humphrey Milford in three series – the Henny-Penny books, the Tippenny-Tuppenny books and the Teeny-Weeny books. I salvaged about two dozen in collectable condition and all have lovely wraparound art deco boards, plenty of illustrations and decorated end papers to boot. Some of the pictures are coloured in by the original owner but I really don’t mind that sort of thing. Pristine, mint condition children’s books give me the creeps.

I also picked up ‘The Old Books Guide’, an excellent free list of the West Country’s 50 odd shops and dealers willing to suffer visitors. It promised me two destinations in Exeter, the best known being Exeter Rare Books, one of the most bizarrely situated antiquarian shops in the country. It’s in a shopping center. Yes, a bright, soulless, identikit shopping mall, just like the one where you live, complete with Primark, Superdrug and Intersport. When I become Prime Minister all these miserable city centre malls will be forced to contain an old bookshop but this one, sadly, is not the sort of place for bargains. Far from it. In particular it reminded me of one of the adages of holiday book collecting: never buy books about the local area. Regulars will have snapped up the best stuff and the rest you can find for half the price anywhere else in the country.

Far more promising is the intriguing Bookcycle. This registered charity works on the genius principle of asking for donations of books so they can send any appropriate ones to African schools. The rest are sold and the money generated is used to plant trees around the UK – turning books back into trees, in fact. The way it works is clever too – customers are allowed three unpriced books a day and pay what they like for them. The mind boggles but in fact this is a sound business model: it’s a freakonomic truth that in situations like this people tend to give more rather than less. The stock is mainly clean paperbacks but there were shelves of older books upstairs and I suspect that frequent visitors would do well, certainly better than in the local Oxfam bookshop which was typically disappointing.

You can read more about book buying-in-the-field in this month’s issue of the much improved Book and Magazine Collector. Many thanks for your comments, by the way. Apparently there is a way for me to respond to them so as soon as I find out the exact buttons to press I’ll be able to disagree with you live, on-line, in real time mode, and then you can re-disagree with me. I can hardly wait.