Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen were responsible for some of the greatest comic writing to come out of this country, but Brian O'Nolan, the man behind these pseudonyms, wasn't always a bundle of laughs - as my late mother, whose temperamental boss he was for a period in the civil service, used to recall.
Still, he was nothing if not self-critical, too. Here he is in 1964 to his London agent on the subject of The Dalkey Archive: "Personally I believe about the last quarter of the book is very badly written indeed, and the Joyce stuff is all uneven and quite lacking in the elegance which is essential where that damn man is dragged on the scene."
He could recognise talent in others, too. In 1965, when Hugh Leonard adapted The Dalkey Archive for the stage under the name The Saints Go Cycling In, O'Nolan wrote to his publisher Timothy O'Keeffe, declaring confidently that "this work will be aimed at film-making. In that connection Hugh Leonard might be a handy man to have around the house."
These morsels come from a correspondence of forty-eight letters written by O'Nolan to his publisher and agent, and if you've got £5,000 and upwards to spare, Mealy's of Castlecomer are auctioning the archive in their latest sale at the Tara Tower Hotel, Merrion Road, Dublin, next Monday and Tuesday.
There are almost 1,300 lots in this two-day sale of rare books and manuscripts. Most of the prices being sought are well under £100, but if money is no object, you might consider an 1897 single-page signed manuscript by W.B. Yeats of The De- sires of Man and Woman, which he later retitled He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World.
You'll get that for between £4,000 and £6,000, which is about £25,000 less than Mealy's are asking for an original copy of the 1916 Proclamation - but then, as they rightly say, this affords "a rare opportunity to acquire, possibly for the last time, a unique piece of Irish history".
In fact, it's one of only sixteen known surviving copies and has been in the same family since April 1916, at which time it had been obtained by the current owners' grandfather, a Donegal-born RIC man whose active Republican sympathies led him to provide confidential intelligence to the insurgents.
Brendan Kennelly has a new book out from Abbey Press. It's called The Singing Tree and it's being launched in Waterstone's of Dawson Street next Thursday at 6.30pm.
This is one of three books published by Abbey Press within a week, the others being elegant chapbooks of verse: Joan Newmann's Thin Ice and Catherine Graham's The Watch.
I missed the launch in Newman House of Terence Patrick Dolan's A Dictionary of Hiberno-English (Gill & Macmillan), but I've been dipping into it a lot over the last week and have found myself well-rewarded, in terms of both knowledge and entertainment .
The author is Professor of Old and Middle English in UCD, where his stern predecessor, Lionel Dunning, tried to teach me the rudiments of those hallowed languages. More successful (and much more approachable) was Fr Dunning's colleague, Alan Bliss, and so I'll place Terry Dolan's book on my shelf between the late Dr Bliss's A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English (Routledge) and Diarmaid O Muirithe's A Dictionary of Anglo-Irish (Four Courts Press).
Three absorbing books.