The Uncensored Diary of a Bookseller — guerilla bookselling

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...

As you glance around the unkempt interior, amid hazardously stacked towers of paperbacks, creeping advancing shelves and cobwebbed crevices, you may not automatically think of love, but a bookshop, even one like Red Books, can be a place of pure romance. And that’s not a reference to the discoloured leaning tower of Maeve Binchys. No, this is a place where out dated concepts like hope and empathy and romance still live. It is also a place where intrigue runs riot. This place can bring people together but it can also divide them. A bookseller must give everything to the cause....