What price a book's dust jacket? No less than £485, apparently, if the book happens to be a first edition of Finnegans Wake.
I learn this from the latest catalogue sent to me by Ray Clements of Hampton, Middlesex, who is offering Joyce's final masterpiece for a mere £140 if you don't require a dust jacket but is demanding a whopping £625 if you do. The moral is clear: when you' re buying the latest masterwork from Banville, Bolger, McCabe, McGahern or whoever, look after those flimsy outer wrappings if you want to make oodles of money in years to come.
The other moral to be absorbed from the catalogues sent to me by second-hand-book specialists is that it pays to shop around. Why, for instance, fork out £18 to Croagh Gorm Books in Birkenhead for a 1970 World Books edition of James Plunkett's Strumpet City when Ray Clements will give you the 1969 Hutchinson first edition for the same price? Why give Joe McCann's Oxford-based shop £20 for Alan Bennett's Writing Home when you can get the same edition for less than a fiver in the remainder sections of most Dublin bookshops? And why pay Croagh Gorm £32 for a first edition of Frank O'Connor's Irish Miles when you can get it for exactly half that amount from Ray Clements?
As it happens, all of the latest catalogues to come my way are from English-based enterprises, and in general their prices are higher than those of their Irish counterparts: Lawrence Block's 1996 thriller Even the Wicked, for instance, at (yikes) £125 and Bruce Chatwin's 1977 In Patagonia at (double yikes) £350.
But there are first editions of many interesting Irish books in all these catalogues, and if you want to know more, Ray Clements is at 114 High Street, Hampton, Middlesex, TW12 2ST; Joe McCann is at 10 White Road, Oxford, OX4 2JJ; and Croagh Gorm is at 56 North Road, Birkenhead, Merseyside L42 7JF.
Ian Paisley is nothing if not single-minded, in literary as well as cultural matters. Asked about his reading preferences in the Guardian's My Media column, he responds:
"I continually read the Bible. I usually get through it two or three times every year. My favourite author from a religious point of view is John Bunyan, especially his Pilgrim's Progress. I also continue to read in the realm of biographies. At the moment it's MacCulloch's biography of Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, and King William III, Prince of Or- ange: The First European. I do read a lot of prayer and theological books, mainly on the Puritan era, and I'm an avid reader of C.H. Spurgeon's sermons."
No Roddy Doyle in that list, I see.
As it happens, John Bunyan's austere classic is the one book Ann Widdecombe feels she should have read but never succeeded in doing. This Tory scourge of wishy-washy liberals gives her own reading preferences in the Sunday Times.
Which author does she most admire? A.A. Milne. With which character would she most like to have an affair? "I would do nothing so indecent but, er, Rudolph Rassendyll from The Prisoner of Zenda?" And what's the most erotic book she's ever read? "I don't read filth."
Quite.
If you're an aspiring writer living in the Tallaght area, the 1998 literary festival organised by Alternative Entertainments and the Clothesline Writers' Group should provide you with some guidance.
Officially opened next Thursday evening by Dermot Bolger, it offers a week of workshop sessions, including Paula Meehan on poetry, Anne McCaffrey on science fiction, Seamus Hosey on writing for radio, Eoin McNamee on writing for cinema and Eileen Battersby on reviewing.
If you want further details, contact Jeni Gaynor at 4621067 or Caroline Barry at 4520611.
Next week sees the publication of Crowe's Requiem, the first novel by 33-year-old Mike McCormack, whose 1996 collection of stories, Getting it in the Head, won considerable acclaim - and gained for its author a Rooney prize.
Jonathan Cape describe Crowe's Requiem as "love story and gothic fairy tale, an eerie and treacherous meditation on the nature of storytelling". I don't know what that means, but all should become clearer when the author reads from the book in Waterstone's of Dawson Street at 6pm next Wednesday and in Keohane's of Galway (where he now lives) the following night at 7pm.