Man’s ‘disbelief’ after five-year quest for rare book ends in local Oxfam shop
Paul Dixon had trawled bookshops and specialist sellers across the UK, and had even contacted shops on the island of Iona.
A Dunblane man who had spent five years searching for a rare paperback has described his “complete disbelief” after a copy turned up in his local Oxfam bookshop.
Paul Dixon, 66, had been looking for a book called Iona Celtic Art: The Work of Alexander and Euphemia Ritchie, which was only published in 2008.
Written by E. Mairi MacArthur, the 80-page volume details the couple’s work crafting and selling jewellery and other items in a shop they opened on Iona in 1899.
The pair were both trained at the Glasgow School of Art and the book is described as a “must-have” for anyone interested in the designs of the Arts & Crafts movement, which celebrated handcrafted, decorative work.
Mr Dixon said he had wanted to find a copy ever since he first heard of it five years ago.
“I’m a big fan of Arts & Crafts and the Glasgow School of Art, and I own a couple of pieces by Alexander Ritchie, the renowned Scottish silversmith and metalworker,” he explained.
“Once I knew the book existed, I just had to find a copy.”
His search saw him trawl bookshops and specialist sellers across the UK, and he even contacted shops on Iona – the small, remote island off the west coast of Scotland – to ask them to hunt through their bookshelves.
“It became slightly ridiculous,” Mr Dixon said. “I could turn up extremely rare books from all over the place, but this one little paperback, published within my lifetime, completely eluded me.”
Mr Dixon’s search became a talking point at the Oxfam bookshop in Stirling, where he was a regular customer.
“It turned into a running joke,” Mr Dixon explained.
“Every time I came in, we’d talk about it. I think we all started to wonder if it even existed.”
The search appeared to be over in November last year when shop manager Neil Paterson spotted the book among a pile of donations that had come in.
Mr Paterson explained: “We’d spoken about that book so many times. When it came in, we put a sign in the window asking Paul to pop in to see if it was the one he’d been searching for.”
However, weeks then went by with no sign of Mr Dixon.
“I kept expecting him to walk through the door,” Mr Paterson said.
“At one point I even saw him outside the shop tying his shoelaces. I was serving customers and couldn’t get away, and by the time I looked again, he’d gone.”
He went on: “We started joking that it felt a bit like the old Yellow Pages JR Hartley advert.
“Someone going from shop to shop for years, determined to track down one particular book and then finally, at long last, finding it.”
The classic Yellow Pages advert, which first aired in the UK in 1983, featured an increasingly frustrated gentleman called JR Hartley who searches bookshop after bookshop for a copy of his own book, Fly Fishing, which is out of print.
It was not until January 2026 that Mr Dixon eventually came back to the shop and found they had the book he had been looking for.
“My first reaction when I finally heard was complete disbelief,” he said.
“I’d actually paused the search before Christmas because I was so busy, I never spotted the sign in the window.
“I couldn’t quite believe it had turned up after all that time.”
Mr Paterson said the moment captures what charity bookshops do best.
“It’s not just about selling books,” he said. “It’s about conversations, shared interests and sometimes helping someone finish a search they thought might never end.”
Oxfam said its network of 40 Scottish street shops have seen a 16% rise in non-fiction sales this financial year compared with last, and its overall second-hand book sales up 4.4%.
The charity shared the story to mark World Book Day on Thursday March 5.
