There’s been grumbling about it before: Local booksellers in the UK aren’t happy about Oxfam bookshops that have been cropping up with increasing regularity and selling not only used books, but new ones, at bargain basement prices.

The books, of course, are donated, and the money goes to a good cause. But Oxfam has gotten considerably more aggressive about generating book donations and opening new shops to sell them in and, well, how’s a little bookseller supposed to compete with a competitor that has no costs?

But the situation seem to reach the detonation point last week when The Bookseller ran a story by Victoria Gallagher with this lede: “Independent booksellers in Herne Hill, south London, have expressed their concern over an Oxfam bookshop which opened today (10th February). According to one local source ‘there’s a lot of bad feeling in Herne Hill’ about the shop, though criticism has been muted ‘because it’s a charity’.”

The article went on to point out that “Oxfam is now the third biggest bookseller in the UK, selling 12 million books a year and making around $20m in profit,” causing some to call it “Tesco of the second-hand book business.”

And with that, the gloves were off. The Spectator‘s Susan Hill attacked Oxfam in a post on her blog called “Bullying is bullying — whoever does it,” in which she called Oxfam “Thugs. Thugs and bullies.”

“Some years ago,” she wrote, “when Ottakars, the bookselling chain, were behaving like thugs, they had a clever tactic. They visited a medium sized town and looked to see if it had a good, thriving independent bookshop. If it did, they opened down the street. Two people I know had to close their previously profitable shops as an immediate result. Now Oxfam is doing the same.” Not only is Oxfam trying to put indie booksellers out of business, she wrote, the company is also using the tactic on other shops run by charities and hospices.

The next day The Bookseller ran a story about Hill’s attack, and The Times of London ran a storyabout a bookseller going out of business—partly because Osfam had opened a bookshop nearby.

Then someone who seems to work at one of the Oxfam shops chimes in with a post on their blog, Meandmybigmouth, says “let’s look instead at some of the comments the pieces have attracted. They are fucking hilarious.” Here’s one he/she cites, with accompanying commentary:

‘Assisting Third World nations in the process of over-breeding themselves into oblivion is far more important than insuring a couple of local bookseller’s jobs.’ I believe this is an example of sarcasm. This from someone calling himself Son of Goatboy (presumably not his real name) and a comment he is so proud of, he posted it beneath both Bookseller pieces.

Well, yes Mr. Goatboy (or may I call you Twat?) I do think that assisting nations poorer than our own is more important than insuring a few booksellers’ jobs, but I don’t actually see the two as mutually exclusive. I don’t judge the worth of my fellow man by their proximity to me or what books they read. Although I clearly do judge my fellow man by the level of fuckwittery in their internet comments.

My guess: it’s all downhill from here ….