Death of a Bookstore

Borders Bookstore in Blanchardstown is shutting its doors this weekend, another victim to the recession and another indicator of just how quickly the country is sinking. An Spailpín will be out there this weekend, with wheelbarrow and credit card, looking for bargains with all the other vultures, but it will be a sad affair.

Though never a favorite, Borders was a lovely store to visit, as its parent stores in England and the US are. There was a coffee shop upstairs where ladies could sip tea and discuss Jodi Picoult, and there was a huge, really huge, selection of books.

If it had a fault, Borders always had a little too much of the taste of Britain about it. Like a lot of stores in the shopping centres in Dublin, you can get a sense of disorientation in there, not being sure if you’re in Dublin or Doncaster. A stronger Irish tinge to the place would have made a difference, and a few less examples of the Jeremy Clarkson / Chris McNab school of letters.

It’s unlikely that touch of Irish would have saved it though. It saves so very little else in the country as we slip further beneath the waves. Ultimately, there just weren’t enough people buying enough books for Borders to continue.

Maybe if had had been in the main Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, rather than one of the retail parks. Maybe if traffic weren’t so nightmarish on the M50 that people would be more inclined to stop and browse, rather than set the teeth grimly and keep crawling for home. Maybe if the worse recession since the thirties hadn’t descended from the clear blue skies...

No matter. Borders is gone now, and it’ll a long time before its masters back in head office sign off on another Irish adventure. In the meantime, the site is empty, waiting for whoever will take it over. The bottom has fallen out of the lap-dancing market, if you’ll pardon the pun – maybe Borders will become a tattoo parlour? After all, they already have the KFC out there.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, bookstores, Dublin, recession, books

World Book Day and Dublin's Second Hand Bookstores

Leonard Cohen hailed Dublin as “a city of writers and poets” during his series of concerts at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, last summer. How sad, then, to reflect on how Dublin’s second hand bookstores are now winking slowly out of existence, like stars in some doomed galaxy on the edge of the Milky Way.

Dandelion Books, a haven for science fiction, or speculative fiction as the aficionados currently have it, was on Aungier Street. Now it’s not. The Rathmines Bookshop is currently mutating into an art gallery and, saddest of all, Greene’s bookstore on Clare Street is now a haberdashery – the body is clothed where once the soul was fed.

Greene’s was the best of the three, because it has those two features without which no true second hand bookstore could be considered worthy of the name – it had shelves and it had stairs, and it had both in abundance. The shelves in Greene’s started at the very bottom of the stairs, and then snaked an eclectic path upwards, John Grisham standing cheek by jowl with John Milton.

Upstairs, a huge arched window lit the first floor, and shelf after shelf of books of theology and divinity that were never going to move. There was a shelf of Irish interest next to that, and then an alcove of Americana, biography and, bizarrely, true crime stories.

I bought a lot of old Irish language books there, in the old typeface and the old spelling – double jeopardy for the amateur, and no walk in the park for the seasoned student of the First Language. I bought a volume of short stories by Séamus Ó Grianna there, who published under the pen-name of “Máire” – a reverse Ellis Bell, if you like.

The book is called “Úna Bhán,” and the cover has a lovely water-colour illustration of that same lady, up on the back of a jaunting car, flowered hat tight on her head, a spare in a round hatbox behind the driver, waving goodbye to her people while off to make a new life in America.

The jaunting cars and hats are all gone now, and poor Greene’s is gone with them, exiled from its sweet city centre spot between the canals to one of the industrial estates that skirt the M50, now existing only in cyberspace like that other Irish bibliophile’s Shangri-la, Kenny’s of Galway.

The Hidden Bookstore on Wicklow Street carries on, of course, and that marvellous store in the George’s Street arcade with all its wonderful old Irish books, including marvellous Anvil paperbacks about faction fighters, the Normans and Devil’s Own Connaught Rangers. But the new prince and chief of Dublin’s second hand bookstores is now on the other side of the river, part of the astonishing development of Parnell Street as the twenty-first century rumbles on.

Chapters Bookstore has moved from its snug spot besides Arnott’s and Eason’s and the former office of the Irish Independent newspaper on Middle Abbey Street to its current glass façade in the Ivy Exchange, shared with the new and shiny Tesco on the corner.

Where on Middle Abbey Street it was small and dark and pleasingly musty, Chapters on Parnell Street is all brightness, light and fluorescence. The contrast between the old gloom and the new glow is such that going inside is as jarring for the bibliophile as entering the great cathedrals of Notre Dame or Chartes must have been for the medieval monks of France, used to tallow candles and perpetual twilight.

The selection in Chapters is better than it ever was in Dandelion Books, or Rathmines, or even Greene’s, but it’s hard not to notice that a second hand bookstore isn’t really about the selection. This ebay age has changed the rules that regard, because the internet now means that nothing is ever unobtainable.

But the fact of the books being second-hand is what generates the magic in a second hand bookstore. A bookstore is just a place of retail, but a second-hand bookstore feels more like a library. A library that belonged to thousands and thousands of people, each of whom had his or her own story and life and existence, and brought worth to that existence through their reading of books.

And now there’s a good chance that person is in another existence, and the books have been left behind. Any time you see a row of newly stocked Modesty Blaises or Bonds or ever poor Louis L’Amour in a second hand bookstore, chances are someone has gone on their last caper, assignment, or lonesome trail in the west, and the books are now foundlings, looking for a new home.

Isn’t it a pity that Dublin can’t emulate Paris and its great love of books? How lovely it is to see the stalls being set up in the mornings along the Seine, in the shadow of the great cathedral, and the rich display of wares.

There are bookstalls in Rome too, but they seem rather more interested in selling what used to be known as pictures of the Eiffel Tower than musty old copies of Dante or Boccaccio. One hopes none of our own visiting clerics peers too closely – it may shatter one too many illusions.

The weather in Dublin militates against the open air kiosks, of course, and those few braves souls who set up stalls in Temple Bar need to keep their eyes peeled for squally hens and stags coming from the east as just as much as showers and gales blowing in from the west. But it is rather sad that Dublin, a city haled as a city of poets and writer by one of the greatest poets and writers of our age on a blessed Friday the thirteenth last year in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, is losing these second hand bookstores, these lodestars of the literary life.

The city of Long Beach, California, designated Bertrand Smith’s famous Acres of Books bookstore as a “cultural heritage landmark” eighteen years ago, and Long Beach, lovely though it is, does not have the literary reputation that Dublin enjoys. Something to ponder today, World Book Day.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, culture, books, bookstores

The Books Crux - Who Will Love My Babies?

Haunting the bookstores is one of the things that An Spailpín Fánach particularly enjoys doing. Even when I don’t buy any, I like looking at the books on the shelves and tables, seeing them there, and enjoying that peculiar atmosphere that exists only in bookstores. That atmosphere is heightened in second-hand bookstores, as I remarked in this space earlier, when mourning the passing of Greene’s of Clare St, and the second-hand stores always carry the additional promise of buried treasure, the book that everybody has forgotten but you.

I discovered just such a cache on Saturday, on a visit to the Secret Book and Record Store on Dublin’s Wicklow Street, a few doors down from Tower Records. You go down a long corridor to get to the Secret Store itself, and then you burst into the light, into a large retail space. In the middle are the display tables, with the special offers, while the books are categorised in a more orderly fashion on the shelves on the wall. And last Saturday, on the table nearest the door, I saw them.

Three piles, with maybe twenty or so books per pile, of books by such pulp greats as Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney. What made them so wonderful – Wallace hasn’t aged well and I had never heard of Peter Cheney – was that they were all Pan books from the forties and fifties, with those marvellous Pan covers, with the cartoon drawings of terrified dames, tough guys with gatts and square-jawed heroes with cigarettes hanging from their lips, felt hats pulled down hard over one eye and bottles of mule-kicker rye whiskey just sticking up out of the suit jacket pocket.

And then I realised that there was only one way for all these books to have come on the market so suddenly – someone has swapped the easy-chair and the reading lamp for wings and the sheet music of the Choir Invisible. They’ve crossed over the bar and their books have been left behind, with no-one to care for them anymore. The books are in beautiful condition too, especially considering they’re so old. The shop owner even remarked on it, saying that most books of that genre get creased and hammered and kicked around, whereas these were loved and cherished. Anne Fadiman wrote in her wonderful Ex Libris that the one area where men show genuine tenderness is over their books – whoever collected these Edgar Wallaces loved them the way courtly swains love their maidens fair.

And now the lover is gone, and the maidens must make their own way in the world. I hope it’ll go easy on them, not least as I had a presentiment of my own deeply treasured collection ending up in a similar circumstance on a similar table. My friend An Tomaltach and I were taking porter in McDaid’s of Harry Street only a few days earlier, and our conversation turned to the issue of books, and how hard it is to keep them.

Although I have yet to ask him, I would hazard a fair guess that An Tomaltach would agree with me that the library of Lord Peter Wimsey, the gentleman sleuth, is pretty much the ideal for the conscientious bibliophile. Dorothy L Sayers tells us of the library that “its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embrace of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby-grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèrves vases on the chimney piece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums.” Nice. Miserably, it’s hard to bang a library like that into a two-up two-down in a former corpo estate in the capital of the Irish nation, and it can only exist as an ideal, rather than an attainable goal. An Spailpín Fánach is up to his rapidly receding hairline in books, and he’s trying to summon the god of geometricians to figure a way to get the lot shelved without flooding me out of house and home.

Eventually, of course, it will come to either selling or donating some of the books, or buying a bigger gaff. The bigger gaff is the option of choice, but one which may be looked at askance by our friends in the banks, subjecting us to a smorgasbord of easy credit this time last year, tightening the belt as the hangman tightens the noose this year. But I hope and pray that the weather changes before I have to serve eviction orders on any of my books, and they end up in a pile similar to that one in the Secret Book and Record Store. This is difficult to understand for my friends who have no hoarding instinct or who, bizarrely, actually give their books away after reading them. A number of years ago I caught a friend with One Hundred Years of Solitude in a box destined for a charity shop; An Spailpín Fánach is now the proud owner of two copies of same magisterial novel.

But this Mother Goose complex is an instinct which I will have control, until such time as your faithful narrator buys his tropical island paradise and builds his bookshelves from palm trees. As such, your faithful narrator has been taking it easy in his book shopping this weekend. Only the Dorothy L Sayers’ from which I got that marvellous library description. And Ingrid Black’s first book. And two highly regarded movie books that, bizarrely, were on sale in Chapters, and therefore irresistible. And a jackpot collection of the old Irish Press columns of Seán Ó Ruadháin, my fellow Mayoman – a terrible crank in many ways but my God, beautiful Irish. But that’s it, definitely, until Christmas at the very earliest.

Except for when Duggan’s book finally comes out, of course...





Technorati Tags: culture, books, bookstores, pan paperbacks