The Bookshops of Dublin (2)

In which I continue my "biblio-crawl" through the bookshops of Dublin. This might be of interest to a bibliophile coming here on holiday or a Dubliner curious to see how his or her views compare with mine. I don't understand why there are so few reviews of bookshops, when newspapers and magazines and the internet are crammed with restaurant and hotel reviews.

Veritas Books, Abbey Street

Considering this is Dublin's city centre's premier Catholic bookshop, it might be expected to feature pretty highly in my favourites. Alas, such is not the case.

First of all, the good things. Veritas Books is clean and bright and well-laid out. It smells and looks nice, because of all the ornaments and candles and calendars and other decorative items on sale. (The giant nativity sets and rosary beads and the enormous holy statues are especially striking.) It's fantastically well-stocked and the staff are helpful and pleasant.

But I can't spend more than ten minutes in this shop without getting strangely depressed. It has many interesting and scholarly and worthwhile books, but the vast majority of its books seem to be of a rather wishy-washy, bland, candles-and-muzak type. Pluck a book from its shelves at random and its likely to have a title like: "Rediscovering Celtic Christianity". There will be a soft-focus cover of a ripple in a pond, or a bird in the sky. The blurb will probably begin something like this: "In our fast-paced society, many increasingly feel a sense of emptiness..."

Now, I'm not necessarily dismissing this type of publication. Goodness knows our society is lacking in gentleness. The last thing I would ever want to do is sneer at this sort of "Thought for the Day" spirituality. But such perfume, pleasant enough in moderation, positively makes your eyes water when it is present in such overpowering quantities.

In short, Veritas Books seems too much like the Mind, Body and Spirit shelves of an ordinary bookshop, except with a little bit of Christianity (as Fr. Brian Darcy might put it) sprinkled on top. It's a good port of call if you are looking for a particular Catholic book, but not somewhere I like to browse.

Dubray Books, Grafton Street

Every Dubray bookshop is pretty much the same as every other Dubray bookshop. You are unlikely to find anything even a half a step off the beaten track in Dubray. The classic literature section is usually quite extensive. The Grafton Street branch has a fairly wide stock, and if you are looking for a particular book that was either recently published or that is a classic everybody has heard of, you'll more than likely find it here. It's a bit pokey, but not in a pleasant way. Again, anything but a browser's paradise. They pack the shelves uncomfortably tight.

Eason, O'Connell Street

Everybody calls this shop "Eason's", even though the name is quite clearly spelled Eason. An odd Dublin quirk.

This shop, of course, is more of a municipal institution than a mere bookshop, being in the centre of Dublin's main street, and under whose clock generations of Dubliners have arranged to meet. Considering its size, it's not as well-stocked as you might suppose, and it's often surprising what books you can't find there. On the other hand, it has more of a grab-bag flavour than the drearily predictable Dubray Books (and such like stores)-- especially on the basement, where the classics, poetry, religion, philosophy, and all the other more chewable subjects are shelved.

It has probably the best selections of newspapers and magazines in Dublin, and a walk around this area is quite depressing-- there seem to be any number of publications devoted to karate, soap operas, TV vintage tractors and record collecting, while the more literary and philosophical magazines hardly make up so much as a drop in the ocean.

The first floor is full of stationery and greeting cards, while there is a Tower Records shop on the top floor. Both of these are pleasant to walk around.

There are other Eason bookshops scattered around the country, especially in train stations and airports. You're unlikely to find anything outside the latest bestseller lists in these. Recently, Eason have taken over the Hughes and Hughes chain of bookshops, which was (I always assumed) an Irish version of Barnes and Noble and was even more soulless than Dubray Books. They can't get any worse under the new management.

(There is one former Hughes and Hughes shop, now an Eason shop, which is not entirely soulless. The branch in Stephen's Green Shopping Centre has a discount section downstairs that throws up a fair amount of surprises. The "For Clearance" shelf especially is worth checking out.)

Years and years ago, Easons used a very distinctive and attractive combinaton of colours on their branding-- navy and emerald stripes. They have replaced this with a blander, brighter green. I think it's a shame.

More to come!

The Bookshops of Dublin (1)

Samuel Johnson famously said that "There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn". I think that is still true, two centuries later.

But there are some things that produce almost as much happiness as a good tavern or inn, and I think that bookshops are pretty high up in that list.

Who doesn't love a bookshop? I mean a good bookshop, of course. There are bookshops that are depressing beyond words. But most bookshops have something to endear them.

I have thought a lot about the appeal of bookshops. It doesn't come down to any single point, of course, but I think that-- for me-- the main point is that life seems so interesting when you are standing in a bookshop. You go from shelf to shelf, glancing at the titles on the spines. You see The Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, A Short History of Hats, and Recollections of a London Bus Conductor. You take down a collection of poems entitled The Faces in the Flames, or Symphony in Aquamarine, or The Torchlight under the Blankets. The cover shows a blurry picture of a hearth fire, or a grainy old photograph of a crowded street, or a drawing of a little girl sitting in a wicker seat. You think, Books have been written about everything. Poems have been written about everything. Any amount of wonderful poems could be written about the sunlight falling on that wall, opposite me, right now. Nothing ever happens that isn't dripping with meaning and significance.

When you walk down a street, or sit in a room, or look out a window, the world can seem like a chaotic flux, a blur of arbitrary and boring occurences, "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing". But when you stand in a bookshop, you feel reassured. Life has meaning, and dramatic interest, and purpose, and potential. If it ever seems otherwise-- well, you just haven't read enough books.

Dandelion Books

"There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away", wrote Byron, and in the case of Dublin bookshops, it's true. The best Dublin bookshop I ever knew is, unfortunately, a fading memory. I spent untold hours there in my college years. It was Dandelion Books in Aungier Street and it was everything a great bookshop should be. First off, it was a second-hand bookshop (or a used bookstore, as Americans would say.) I think a truly great bookshop has to at least have a second-hand section, but Dandelion Books was (if I remember correctly) all secondhand. It was pervaded with a faint and intoxicating scent of dust. The shelves reached right to the ceiling. Importantly, it catered to every "brow"-- lowbrow, middle-brow, and high-brow. (The only thing worse than a bookshop that only sells Jilly Cooper-type books is a bookshop that only sells James Joyce-type books.) There were shelves and shelves of science-fiction, fantasy and horror novels. (I remember hearing a staff member remark, to another customer, that "If I had my way, the Bible would be on the science fiction shelves".) But it also had shelves of thrillingly scholarly-looking books. I suspect my imagination has magnified them in retrospect-- I think back and I see thick volumes, so huge they would have to be held in two hands, about the European Common Market and Vietnam and political philosophy, lurking on the upper shelves, their titles printed in uncompromising Times New Roman.

The aisles in Dandelion Books were very narrow, and I think this also makes for a good bookshop-- the customer should feel that she (there's a sop to the feminists) is in a labyrinth of books. It gives it an exciting, secret-cavern kind of feeling. The shop also had a large, circular, convex mirror in one upper corner, and (now that I come to think of it), this seemed symbolic to my mind-- since books have always seemed to me like a reflection of reality, but a magical reflection that heightens reality, just as the reflections in that circular mirror were elongated and faraway.

Best of all, Dandelion Books usually-- or perhaps always-- had BBC Radio 4 playing on the radio. Readers from America may not know BBC Radio 4. Just imagine two English people with plummy, donnish accents talking about Schopenhauer or the Normandy landings or Greek drama. That's an idealized version of BBC Radio 4, but it's not too far off from the reality, at its best moments. In terms of the atmosphere it gave the bookshop, this radio station was the aural equivalent of a fat cat lying curled up in front of the fireplace. It only seemed to deepen the silence, only seemed to intensify the sense of timelessness-- the voices were so leisurely and detached, the tones so somnolent.

The Secret Book and Record Shop

How I miss Dandelion Books. It closed without me noticing, but it must be gone at least seven or eight years now. Apparently The Secret Book and Record Shop on Wicklow Street is its successor (whatever that means-- I read it just now on the internet, when trying to find out what happened to Dandelion Books). This is a bookshop that strains with every fibre of its being to be cosy, atmospheric, pleasantly shabby, and everything a second-hand bookshop should be. Maybe I am unfair to it (who can really judge atmosphere?), but it only seems trendy and hipster-ish to me-- from the period postcards and bric-a-brac lined along the top of the shelves to the newspaper cuttings advertising various "gigs" and poetry readings and whatnot. The biggest difference between The Secret Book and Record Shop and a proper secondhand bookshop is the intrusion of popular music-- specifically, the rather hippy-ish music that this shop seems to specialise in. The mere sight of a psychedelic album cover seems to explode the whole leisurely, dreamy atmosphere that a second-hand bookshop should aspire to.

Besides, I've never found anything really good in The Secret Book and Record Ship. Whatever magic dust hangs on the shelves of the best second-hand bookshops was never sprinkled there.

But my subject has taken a hold of me, and I prattle on at more length than I intended. I am going to cut myself off here, and resume my survey of Dublin bookshops in future posts-- I hope.

On Books

Somebody recently gave me an anthology of Catholic poetry that she had lying around the house and didn't want to keep. I've just been glancing through the introduction, and I felt an oh-so-familiar surge of delight; delight in book introductions, delight in the printed page, and simple delight in books themselves.

I've worked in a library for just over ten years, so by a depressingly familiar logic, I should have lost any romantic view of books by now. This is the same logic that operates when people knowingly assure me I would get tired of snow if I lived in a snowy climate. Well, I wouldn't ever get tired of snow, and I haven't lost any of my starry-eyed view of books.

Encomiums to books are always in danger of being a little irritating, or even more than a little irritating. They can seem rather self-congratulatory-- hey, look how well-read and cultured I am!

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I can't engage in any such posturing. I am not well read. I have never read Ulysses, Don Quixote, or The Anatomy of Melancholy. I am a slow reader. I don't like Shakespeare all that much (apart from The Tempest) and one of my favourite books is Hollywood vs. America by Michael Medved, a polemic against violent and cynical and anti-religious movies. What I love are books, not Books.

I sometimes think that the sense of glamour that hung over writing, back in the days when few people were able to read and write, must still survive in some residual form. All written words seem magical to me. In the era of emails and podcasts, writing still seems like a novelty. How can a scene, a story, a personality be captured in marks on paper? That fundamental miracle is much more impressive, much more of a leap, than sending a message from New York to Melbourne in an instant.

I remember how once, sitting on a bus and reading a ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu, I was struck with overwhelming force by the idea that this person who was telling me a story had lived over a century ago. The reality of that gulf of time, and the fact that the gulf simply disappears when a reader loses himself in the text, suddenly seemed real to me. Le Fanu died in 1873. Nobody who was alive when he was writing is alive today. And yet I can re-enter his world through his words, not only looking in from outside, from a distance, but I can become a part of it-- a world that was just as real as ours, in which time passed at a second per second, and in which people gossiped and yawned and moaned about the weather.

There is a wonderful line in the film Shadowlands, the CS Lewis biopic: "We read to know that we are not alone." I don't think it could be put better than that. How absurd-- but how true-- that we can be lonely in a city buzzing with millions of souls, and with voices endlessly coming at us from radio and television, but that this loneliness can be assuaged by words printed on a page! There is an intimacy between reader and writer that I do not think is matched by any other intimacy. The writer puts so much of himself into his words, the reader opens himself to them so fully. There is nothing half-hearted or perfunctory about the encounter. Reader and writer have each others' full attention, and nothing comes between them.

I like a book to take itself seriously, even if it's no more than a volume of fishing anecdotes. I expect a book to make an effort. I want the title to have a bit of swagger (like a wine-themed book I once came across with the Biblical title Stay With Me With Flagons). I feel cheated if there is no dedication, and disappointed if the dedication is no more than a terse To my Uncle Ned.

More than anything else, maybe, I look for an Introduction or a Preface or a Foreword-- and not simply a "Note on the Text" or a few purely explanatory lines. I want an Introduction that begins The book you are holding in your hands or So much has been written about or maybe I first had the idea for this book forty-five years ago. Sometimes I think the Introduction is my very favourite part of the book, just as the trailers are my favourite part of the movies. I want to be welcomed into a book.

Sometimes there are several introductions. It doesn't get much better than that.

 Footnotes, however, are another story. They are good if they are rare and gratuitous. They are bad if they are copious and essential. Nothing is more irksome than to be jerked out of one stream of text continually. It is like having somebody repeatedly tug on your sleeve.

I feel a bit bashful admitting my next requirement, but here goes. I want the author to be my friend. I do not want an author like the ideal author Stephen Daedalus describes in Portrait of the Artist: "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." I want the author to be chatty, effusive, enthusiastic, chummy, conspiratorial. I want him to be on fire for his subject, whether his prose style is folksy or urbane. I want personality, even in a book of history or philosophy-- even in a reference work on old postcards or a guide to my consumer rights.

I was blessed to grow up in a house with hundreds of books on the bookshelf. I was even more blessed that these books were utterly diverse in character. There was an account of jungle warfare, a tract by an obscure religious cult, a drawing manual, a book on dream interpretation, a guide to publishing your own magazine or newspaper-- and of course any number of novels, poetry anthologies, history books and so forth. I think this kind of dizzy diversity of books gives a growing child just as much of a sense of the world's wideness, of life's teeming possibilities, as growing up in a circus or as an army brat.

Those books on the shelf! How can I write their tribute, or what they meant to me? I used to love to take a random book from the shelves, open it at a random page, and bask in the sense of mystery and enigma and excitement that gave me. I loved the idea that these silent voices were forever talking, even when they were not being read-- that the bookshelf was full of things happening all the time, between the covers.

And nothing will ever exceed the sense of gravitas that the "grown-up" books on the shelf held for me. I mean books with earnest, magisterial titles, like Portugese Africa and the West or The Hidden Persuaders or A Nation Writ Large? Somehow-- goodness knows from where-- I got the idea that such books were written by middle-aged to elderly men who knew everything about economics, poetry, history, psychology and everything else, and who saw all the connections between those different fields. Their titles gave me the feeling-- the strangely pleasant feeling-- that I was missing about 98 per cent of what life contained, that life was deeper than I could even hope to understand, but that it all lay before me.

When I grew up, I would learn that many "serious" books were works of scientific or economic or other reductionism, dedicated to the idea that life is much more trivial and simplistic and dull than anything which could live in a child's imagination. But the sense of wonder, of the sublime, that those titles evoked in me all those years ago has never faded.

Books. They are one of life's chief delights, and anyone who thinks of them as simply containers of information, like a computer programme manqué, is to be pitied rather than despised.