The Uncensored Diary of a Bookseller — guerilla bookselling

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....

“Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet.”“Dolet himself does not suffer, but the pious crowd grieves”.- Étienne Dolet as he was led through a mob to his death In 1546, French scholar, printer and sometime bookseller Étienne Dolet was arrested for printing 'blasphemous' books which approved of the doctrine of predestination. The French parliament ordered the burning of Dolet's book containing 'damnable, pernicious and heretical doctrines'. A great fire was made in Place Maubert in the city of Paris. Dolet was hung on gallows and thrown into the fire with his books. Both were burnt to ashes. On a...