A branch of Oxfam has asked people to stop donating Dan Brown’s hit novel because it has too many copies. Which other titles are most unwanted?

A branch of Oxfam in Swansea has received a copy a week of The Da Vinci Code since its staff can remember. Lately, manager Phil Broadhurst has make a tower with the books, at the foot of which he has posted a note, now widely shared online. “You could give us another Da Vinci Code ... but we would rather have your vinyl! We urgently need more records to ... make more money for Oxfam.”

Three years ago, at the height of Fifty Shades mania, Broadhurst and staff made an impressive fort out of copies of EL James’s wooden prose. As now, they asked donors for “60s and 70s vinyl” instead.

As the tide washes back out on a fad, it can leave a sticky residue. That year, Travelodge released a list of its most left-behind books. The top five started with Fifty Shades and included JS Scott’s Shades-esque Billionaire series and Jennifer Probst’s similarly themed The Marriage Bargain.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Not as popular as it used to be ... Fifty Shades of Grey.

Travelodge’s list is a fascinating dip into the ephemera of changing times. In 2007, it was Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years that topped the chart. By 2010 it was an “unauthorised” biography of Simon Cowell, alongside The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means by Vince Cable.

The website webuybooks.co.uk keeps tabs on which tomes it receives most often. In 2015, the second-most unwanted book was The Fault in Our Stars – John Green’s young adult romance, which was recently adapted for film – with JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at No 1.

With 80m copies sold, The Da Vinci Code is the second-most popular book of modern times, so it is no surprise that it turns up in large numbers. But not everything that appears again doesn’t sell. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones series enjoys a lively karmic cycle. Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin ranked as the third-most donated author in one poll, yet he was listed in the same poll as the bestselling charity shop author.

If anything, the music section of Oxfam has always had it worse. On the back of the chart-friendly acoustic rock of Out of Time and Automatic For the People, REM foisted the more grungy and uneven Monster on the public in 1994. It soon became a standing joke in secondhand record stores that you would have to fight your way past a pile of unsold orange CDs, which migrated into it being the quintessential 1p-on-Amazon record. Its legend has been exceeded in the UK only by Oasis’s Be Here Now. While both have enjoyed a critical revival in recent times, even vinyl copies would probably remain verboten.