NE summer, when I was a student at Trinity College in Dublin, I got a job helping to clear out a very old bookshop on the banks of the River Liffey. Years before, the proprietor—for reasons unknown—had simply locked it up one day and left, never to return. Over time, the shop fossilised into a literary time capsule. The bell on the door remained silent, the books gathered dust and the shelves mouldered as the damp seeped in, until the shop was finally sold and the decision was taken to reopen it. For several months, I was immersed in the business of taking apart a bookshop and putting it back together again. The abandoned volumes were sorted, boxed up and sold, and an array of shiny new titles were shipped in, to be catalogued and arranged upon the shelves. There was fresh paint, bleached wood, a credit-card machine and a restaurant upstairs. It was quite clearly the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, a glimpse into the heart
