Owner writes last sad chapter in the story of old bookshop
New homes for 70,000 books are needed as a browsers’ paradise prepares to close it doors for the last time, writes Liam Collins
WHEN you enter the half-timbered old shop, you get the pungent smell of books, ink and the timeless air of a place where the pace of life has changed little over the last half century.
Some of the books may even have been resting on the shelves that long.
How many there are the owner can’t really say, but a conservative estimate puts the number of volumes at 70,000 and growing.
Sitting at his desk Sean Day can look back and forward to shelves groaning under the weight of books, at banana boxes piled on top of each other, each filled with books, at the chairs and tables, even the floor stacked with more books.
“It’s got out of hand,” he admits, sitting in front of the computer screen at which you find him each day when you enter Carraig Books on Main Street, Blackrock, Co Dublin.
Opulent leather scents, pungent old ink, paper perfume, gilt-edges wink; books celebrate our very existence, phrases underlined, pencilled persistence.
This is a verse from his friend and poet Louis Hemmings, a one-time employee of the old bookshop, celebrating its uniqueness.
Among the volumes is one printed in Paris in 1543, rows of old bound books smelling of leather and ink, Ulick O’Connor’s biography of Oliver St John Gogarty, a volume of Press Association reportage on the funeral of John F Kennedy, school books in old Irish script, priests breviaries, Marty Whelan’s autobiography That’s Life and an eclectic mixture of the old, the new, the historical, religious, the valuable and the mundane.
Sadly, like all good things it is coming to an end.
The ‘For Sale’ sign has gone up on the house where Sean Day, now over 70, has been plying the book trade since the family arrived in Blackrock in 1963 via his father’s various bookshops — Liffey Book, Harcourt Books and the Museum Bookshop in Kildare Street, Dublin.
“My whole life is books,” says Sean, who is not going to retire, but will help to hand over what’s left from the shop to his granddaughter Ruth Hickey, who intends to keep on their mail order business and may well open her own shop in time.
“We could have ended up in the Isle of Man,” says Sean, reflecting back on how the Day family, father Alfred, mother Kathleen and their seven children washed up, almost by accident, in this rambling old building that was once The Minerva Tea Rooms, where dainty ladies met after sunny afternoons at the seaside.
“A Captain McGlinchy bought the shop in Kildare Street and my father was looking at the Isle of Man, Oxford and Taunton, but my mother said ‘you can’t root up the family and move there’, and they found this old place and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”
Carraig Books is a brows- er’s paradise, but it’s almost too much, as its owner Sean concedes.
I’ve just listened to an exchange between him and a book lover called Don, who called looking for a book from his childhood The Boys from Binn Eadair.
He couldn’t remember the author and the book seller doesn’t remember it either, but by some piece of antiquarian alchemy he digs it out from some obscure shelf. Don, obviously a book lover, is delighted with the find but looking around he states the obvious, “there’s too much here”, something Sean Day can’t argue with.
It just caught up on him over all the years he’s worked here, first as a schoolboy and later as the owner of one of Dublin’s dwindling band of second-hand book stores. He remembers Greene’s in Clare Street, Fred Hanna’s on Dawson Street, and along the south Liffey Quays all the other second-hand book dealers now long gone. We recall the old bookseller Rodney Danker who lived on the edge of Tallaght and filled his bungalow with so many books he could hardly get in any more. He eventually sold everything at £1 a volume no matter what the cost or value.
“What worries me is that nobody will want them, I would hate to have to pulp them,” says Sean reflecting on the unthinkable, having to throw away a single book.
He had planned to hold a massive book sale last November, but he had to get a catalogue out for Christmas and the time passed. But now the imminent sale of the building has concentrated his mind.
First he has to clear space so that customers will be able to move around freely and he knows he’ ll have to have a sale, something he’s never done before, to shift as many volumes as he can before moving out of the building.
Although he has some valuable books, he never “discovered” a long lost treasure. But he has “nice stuff” and even the antiquarian books are reasonably priced.
He bought a few library collections and recalls going to the Bishop’s Palace in Armagh and coming away with the library of George Otto Simms.
But buying books is never an exact science. It sounds like that reality television series from the United States, where people buy a storage lockup, not really knowing what they’re going to get.
“It’s very hard to evaluate what you are getting. Libraries can be uneven and my experience is what you think you can sell in three months is worth buying, otherwise there is a lot of storage involved,” says Sean.
He can be contacted at carraigbooks@indigo.ie and he will keep anyone who gets in touch informed of his plans for the book sale, probably in the late autumn. The printing business at the back of the shop, Blackrock Printers, will continue in business at a new location.
Sadly by the end of 2017 Louis Hemmings’s words will be all that is left of this wonderful landmark, as another little bit of old Dublin falls to the onward march of progress.
“Rows of books, somewhat regimented, pages permeate, shop sweetly scented; browsers biblio-dip, or diligently delve — serendipity awaits on dusty shelves...”
‘What worries me is that nobody will want them’