The Uncensored Diary of a Bookseller

Mosley says that WB Yeats died of TB after his blindness and early onset dementia made him confuse Lady Gregory’s cat for a rabid Badger, which bit him when he stroked its mane and called it polly. “The establishment covered it up of course,” he tells me in hurried hushed tones, as unsuspecting customers browse around us. “Sure what would happen if the world found out our most successful poet mistook a cat for a rabid badger? We’d be the laughing stock of the literary world. Stupid auld hoor anyway.” Six years ago I began an odyssey into the multi-layered...

Kevin Gildea had a fabulous piece in the Irish Times recently about his bookstore in Dún Laoghaire. Unfortunately it’s closing next January. Another book reservation tarmacadamed over by “progress” to make room for vapeshops and Amazon fulfilment centres. Gildea gave a few very interesting quotes. “As at a cat or dog shelter, I took in books with no homes to go to, from people clearing out houses because of death or downsizing: books that would otherwise go to the dump.” I visited Gildea’s bookstore, being a bookstore geek who can’t walk past one without dipping in for a hunt, and...

Some auld bustard on the comment section of the Irish Times website says that everyone in the bookshop is mad.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human.

“An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...”- Michel Houellebecq, Whatever The French have an expression called ‘La petite mort’ – the little death. In the modern age, it has come to be an expression for an orgasm. It can also mean an event that leaves a person feeling that a...

“Bookselling is full of characters. You don’t have to be an eccentric to be a bookseller, but it helps.”- Gordon Graham, Editor of Logos They say you should never meet your heroes. I met John Banville in a pub in Grand Canaria in 2005. His bare legs dangled red and swollen from a bar stool while he sipped a pina colada from a novelty straw, with a little penis on the end. He was oblivious to his fellow patrons. The pub opened out onto a street filled with scantily clad young women and topless men, who Banville seemed to watch...