Paper gains

Marie-aymone Djeribi makes books. Her one-woman press, called mermaid turbulence, operates from her attic flat in Dublin's Merrion Square. Within the next 12 months, she and her partner will move the operation to Leitrim, where they plan to build a wood and turf house this summer. It seems typical of her that she wants to live in a house she has built herself, out of unusual materials. Djeribi is not interested in doing what anybody else thinks she ought to do, and she is distinctly uninterested in conventional rewards.

"I don't make books to make money. I know for a fact I'm always going to be making books. I love the words, and I love the paper: out of that, you get books," she says.

Letters from Djeribi's 19th-century letterpress are stored in her rooftop office; the press itself is kept on a cement floor in a basement in Ranelagh - so a typo means a mile-walk back to get the right letter. On the stairs are proofs of Michael West's A Play on Two Chairs, to be launched in April.

With no formal training in bookbinding, she also produces handmade books using some distinctly unconventional techniques. Books made of slips of paper in a calico bag, wooden boxes held together by a concertina of pages. . . People who buy the handmade books are as likely to be art collectors as book lovers, with prices varying from £33 to £357.

The publisher's other titles are less esoteric, and can be found in any Dublin bookshop, but her main distribution source is her "infamous mailing list", which includes the names and addresses of everyone who has bought her books. Djeribi moved to Ireland after a stint with the Oxford University Press. In 1990, she started working for the Lilliput Press and since then she has since moved to ever-smaller presses, "until now I'm working on my own".

Many of her friends now refer to her as mermaid. Djeribi is her grandmother's maiden name, assumed several years ago as part of her identification with the Tunisian side of her family. Even a simplified account of the Parisienne's background is head-spinning. Her mother came to Paris aged 20, from Tunisia, with a British passport, due to a Gibraltarian grandfather. Complicated enough for you? And the family is Jewish.

Since she was a little girl, books have been a way of life for her. "You know how in families, things are divided up between siblings?" she asked. "Well, my brother has always been the images person; I grabbed the words as soon as I could."

Her next publication will be by a young artist, Paki Smith, called The Rose Hedge. It's the first of a series of visual-arts books, due to be launched in April. Already, subscribers have put their names down for an hors-commerce copy, including an original gouache, for £230 each. The following project will be "domestic" - a mediation on the function of architecture by architect Dominic Stevens.

With funding from the Arts Council, mermaid turbulence also publishes the literary journal element, which comes out at yearly intervals. With poet Derek Mahon and novelist John McGahern as patrons, each issue is a collection of images and texts, varying from translations of French poems to wartime recipes. The next edition, due out next month, has "enemies" as its theme, and includes a piece by Mark Twain on the traditional enmity between publisher and writer.

Catalogues are available from Mari-aymone Djeribi at 95 Merrion Square West, Dublin 2