When I wrote here last autumn about an afternoon spent scavenging in a skip full of books in Drumcondra – the contents of a former bibliophile’s house that was being cleaned out – a reader regretted the collection had not gone to a charity shop. “What a shame,” she wrote.
But the skip itself was a charity shop of sorts. It enriched the lives and libraries of many local students and others of limited means, while admittedly also adding to the shelves of at least one newspaper columnist with too many books already.
Besides, as I now know, the contents of that and a later skip were a mere preliminary clearance of the hoard inside, without which the house was not safely accessible for anyone from a charity or second-hand bookstore.
To the despair of some of his extended family, the late bibliophile, John Dolan, had kept adding to the collection until his death, at which time there were some 70,000 volumes (not to mention CDs and other bric-a-brac) in a house of 150 square metres.
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Every room was full. Many doors were blocked. You had to walk edgeways down the hall, past books piled three or four deep.
Among those who helped with the epic clear-out, masked up and wearing white overalls, was John’s brother-in-law Paddy Kilduff, a retired Aer Lingus employer, no stranger to collecting himself. Some readers may remember seeing Paddy on the RTÉ series Ireland’s Hidden Treasures in 2024, talking about his own trove of airline memorabilia.
He described himself then as “a bit of a hoarder”. But his hoard, much of which he in any case donated to the National Library, was nothing compared with John’s. The books that went in the skip were only the outer layers, Paddy tells me. After my column appeared, book dealers inspected the rest, van loads of which were taken away.
Dolan himself had been a book dealer once. An advertising copywriter who retired early to look after his mother, he used to sell as well as buy. Then his bibliophilia tipped over into bibliomania, a well-known hazard of the trade, and he became a buyer only. He didn’t even read most of the books he bought, nor could he. He just liked having them.
When first writing about his house, I didn’t mention the address (17 St Clement’s Road – its now up for sale, in case you’re interested). Nor, I assumed, was it identifiable from my photograph of a redbrick terrace, typical of many in Dublin.
But I was wrong. To my own astonishment, it turned out I had a hitherto unknown family connection, not just to the road, but the house itself. Nondescript as the picture seemed, some of my Dublin cousins recognised it as being close to where their mother grew up.
As they were able to tell me, back in the late 1940s or 1950s, two of my Murray uncles, then students or young civil servants, or both, had “digs” in No 17. That’s where one of them, John-Joe, found his future wife, their mother, two doors up (or down) in No 13.
I’m told that another uncle, Jamesie, having one of the few cars locally then, used to go to Dublin at Christmas to bring the brothers home to Monaghan. In those innocent days, the hospitality in No 17 ensured he was always fortified by a whiskey or two before leaving Drumcondra.
It’s not quite the same as finding a wife there, I know. But in finding some books at least, it seems I was keeping up a family tradition.
My favourite acquisition, because it’s so poignantly apt, is one called Buried In Books – A Reader’s Anthology. It’s a collection of quotations by and about book collectors in all the various stages of their condition. Hence for example a chapter subtitled Degrees of Bibliomania, which includes pencil marks in the margins, noting certain passages, presumably by John Dolan himself.
Among the quotations there is one from 1893 about a Monsieur Boulard of Paris, “the greatest buyer of old books this century has seen,” of whom it was said: “ ... his drawingroom, his vestibules, his lumber-rooms, his stairs, his bedrooms, his cupboards bent under the weight of his volumes.”
But the chapter also includes a warning from the French essayist Montaigne, that like all pleasures, books have an “evil side”. They exercise the mind but encourage inactivity in the body, he wrote: “I know of no excess that does me more harm, or that I should avoid more strictly in these my declining years.”
I’m taking his advice personally. In answer to the reader I mentioned at the start, I should point out that even some of the skip’s contents will make it to the charity shops eventually.
Both she and Montaigne might be glad to hear that one of my occasional bodily exercises these days is to cull the excesses of my own library, pack them into one or two heavy-duty Lidl bags and walk to the nearest Oxfam shop.
