The Bookshop Chronicles Part Neen: Cupid is buried in an unmarked grave near Baldwinstown

“Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.” - Adelise M. Cullens 

Cupid is buried in an unmarked grave in a field beyond Baldwinstown. He was executed by Martin Luther for opposing the Reformation after a vicious knife fight on a burning boat entering Kilmore Quay.

“Where did ya hear this Abe?” I ask him.

He belches loudly, nearly falling off my wall and knocking over his cheap can of larger, and then gives me a look as if to insinuate that I’m the cause of his stomach problems. “It’s common knowledge. All these books you have and still you never knew Cupid was buried a few miles from here!”

A lad comes into the shop looking for a book to give his wife for Valentine's Day. A ‘novel’ gift as he keeps telling me, laughing insanely each time.

“What does she like?”

“Well she loves holidays and she’s fond of cheese.”

“Right. I mean, what sort of books does she like?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he says merrily. “Sure I don’t have time to be reading her books. I’m a busy man. Is that not your job to know what she reads?”

“Well I don’t know your wife in fairness. I have no idea what she reads. Has she ever been in here before?”

He snorts, shaking his head madly. “In here? She wouldn’t be caught dead in this place! She gets all her books new in town. I only came here cause I heard you’re cheaper.”

“Maybe she likes thrillers?”

“I don’t know. She’d like something romantic. Like meself.”

“We could try Nicholas Sparks or maybe Jojo Moynes?”

“Something with a pink cover,” he blurts out. “Women love pink sure.”

I sell him a biography of Herman Goring, with a faded red, almost pink cover. Very romantic.

Stout Trout is broke. He’s spent every penny he has sending Valentine’s Cards to every woman he knows, or knows of. Eighty four Valentine’s Cards sent out in the hope of netting at least one potential partner. Carpet bombing love.

All containing snazzy odes penned when he was high on espresso and pain killers.

Roses are Red, 
Violets are Blue, 
I have arthritis 
but I can still pleasure you! 

“Very touching Trout. How is your arthritis by the way?”

“Arthritis is an aphrodisiac Bookman. Women love the early onset of joint stiffness.”

“Mmm, I think you might be mistaking your joints there.”

“If this doesn’t work, I’m leaving the country,” he tells me. “Do you know how much An Post is charging for stamps these days? It’s a disgrace in the current economic climate and half the country on the dole. No wonder the nurses are on strike.”

“It was your decision to send eighty four cards out Trout.”

“Oh that’s right, take their side. That’s why the hospitals are banjaxed and the nurses are on the verge of armed rebellion. They’re able to keep us all divided.”

“What does your Valentines Day cards have to do with the nurses striking anyway?” I ask.

“Everything! Come here, could you lend me a tenner please? I have a few cards left to send still.”

“Trout, why don’t you just go out to one of these singles night’s and try to meet someone real?”

“Have you seen the women at those things?” he cries. “They’re all slobs. Single grannies with pot bellies and missing teeth and walking frames. Jaysus it’s like going into a red cross tent in a third world country when you walk into those nights. And none of them would bid you the time of day. Ignorant women biased against me because of my good background.”

An elderly lady enters the store towards closing time. “I’m looking for a book,” she says.

“Great, we have a few,” I grin.

She doesn’t even smile. “Do you have the one I want?”

“I’m not sure. What book are you looking for?”

“I actually can’t remember the name,” she says, ever so careful to draw her words out, as if that level of sophistication would make up for not knowing the name of the book she’s looking for.

“Ok, who’s the author?”

“The author?”

“The person who wrote the book.”

“I know what an author is,” she snaps. “I’m not an imbecile.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean….”

“I just can’t remember who wrote this particular book,” she continues. “So you can’t remember who wrote the book or the title?”

“Exactly!”

“So what do you want me to do?” I ask.

“Well, do you have it in stock?”

“What?”

“The book I’m looking for!” she spits.

“But I don’t know what the book is that you are looking for. You don’t know what the book is that you are looking for.”

“Good God, I never had this trouble in Easons.”

“Do you know what the book was about?” I say, growing desperate.

“Of course I don’t. If I knew what it was about, why would I be wanting to read it? You’re bloody dreadful.” She heads out, screaming back that she'll be giving me a zero star rate on Facebook.

Locking up, I spot Honest Abe still sitting on the wall, still drinking cans of cheap beer.

“Did ya get any Valentine’s Cards Abe?”

“Of course I did,” he slurs. “They have to take on extra postmen every year on the fourteenth just to deliver all the cards from my admirers.”

“That’s great. At least you’re humble and wouldn’t go around mouthing about it while you’re on the piss all day on someone else’s wall.”

“The only card you’ll get is from the ESB,” he sniggers, staggering around on the wall but somehow defying gravity to keep his perch. “Looking for money off ya.”

“Good night Abe.”

“Hold on! Did I ever tell you about Cupid being buried in an unmarked grave in Baldwinstown?”

“Good night Abe!”

The Bookshop Chronicles Part Ayght: Black Magic, the Golden Goose and the Book Buddha

“These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war. Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are. All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.” – Jen Campbell 

I find myself leaving the bookshop less and less. Socialising has ended. Holidays are an encumbrance. My body has learned to resist hunger and the need for a bathroom for longer and longer periods.

There’s something very reassuring about being literally surrounded by books. All around me, above me, in front and behind. Cocooned in a nest of literature. Hibernating in a cave of the thoughts, aspirations, phobias and vivid accounts of a hundred thousand scripts. A book womb that sometimes I think perfectly reflects the inside of my head.

But sometimes you have to go outside.

“Can we stop at McDonald’s?” Stout Trout asks again.

“No, we're not stopping again and we're certainly not stopping at Mc-fecking-donalds,” the Book Buddha snaps. “McDonald’s ya know! That place will give you cancer. No wonder you’re so fat Trout.”

“I have a thyroid issue actually,” he sulks. “Look, I need to use the bathroom.”

“Again? Christ man, did you not go before we left? We’re only in the car fifteen minutes.” The Book Buddha’s face has gone red and, though he’s still grinning, I know he’s getting angry.

“I have a very weak bladder.”

“From all the fecking McDonald’s!”

We’re driving up Mount Leinster in search of a cache of books. The Book Buddha, a learned scholar of Irish History and rare literature, has heard an old woman is selling off her dead husbands collection. A collection that the Book Buddha believes may contain the Golden Goose.

“Is this area fairly remote?” Stout Trout asks, looking out the back window and obviously noticing a lack of houses and signage.

“There’s no fecking McDonalds up here anyway Trout,” the Book Buddha grins. “You may go hungry for awhile. Do ya good anyway.”

“I don’t like this Bookman,” Trout says. “Did you ever see that film Deliverance? With the hillbillies and squeal like a pig?”

“We're a couple of miles from Enniscorthy Trout! It’s not the bloody outback or anything.”

“Feels like it. Anyway, do you not have enough books? Why don’t you sell the ones you have before you buy more?”

I’m always amazed by why people who don’t have an interest in books can’t understand a book dealers over-riding compulsion to keep purchasing new stock, even when he's overflowing with books. The simple fact is that customers expect to see new titles and, if they don’t, they’ll move onto another bookshop. Our survival as book sellers is hinged on the anti Maria Kondo philosophy of horde and buy and gather. Kinda like squirrels with ADHD.

We eventually pull into a stone paved yard where an old farm house leans perilously over the edge of the mountain. A frail old hag wrapped all in black is watching us as we try to pry Stout Trout out of the back seat of the Passat.

“It’s my back,” he moans. “And your seats are too low.”

“You’re too fat,” the Book Buddha cries.

“I have a medical condition damn it!”

The old woman in black introduces herself as Mrs Mahon and leads us into the dark depths of her mildew encrusted home. Stout Trout complains quietly as we progress deeper into thick stale air.

“Excuse me ma’am, has this place got public liability insurance? If I fall, I could break my leg. I have brittle bones.”

“You’re too fat,” the Book Buddha sneers.

Mrs Mahon leads us into a room completely enclosed with bookshelves and lit by two old gas lamps. It’s hard to see the book titles and the lamps project grotesque shadows across the room. Stout Trout looks physically Ill as he gazes around.

I look to the Book Buddha and he shrugs. We both know instantly that the Golden Goose isn’t here. The Golden Goose is our Ark of the Covenant. Our Excalibur. A near mythical book find that will make us both instantly rich so that we never have to worry about bills, or the leaking roof in the bookshop, or the Passats NCT or Stout Trouts passive aggressive sexual harassment again.

“They’re all old books anyway,” the Book Buddha murmurs. Old books but not the Golden Goose.

“The Satanic Mass, Black Pullet, the Book of Witchcraft,” I read out from the titles in front of me. “These are all books about….”

“Black magic,” Mrs Mahon says.

“Black magic?” Trout squeals. “as in the chocolates or the occult?”

“As in the use of supernatural forces for ones own selfish desires,” Mrs Mahon sighs. “My late husband and I established a coven up here. We pledged our souls to the dark one in exchange for earthly pleasures and riches while we lived. Now he’s dead and I don’t have much life to live.”

“So how much do ya want for the lot?” the Book Buddha asks suddenly, breaking the silence with no regard for the poor woman’s tragic story. “They’re not worth a whole lot now mind so don’t be asking big money.”

“Do you think you’re husband is down there now?” Trout whispers, theatrically pointing down into the ground.

Mrs Mahon seems to think about this for a moment and then smiles. “No, he’s out back in the garden where I buried him. He was dead you see.”

“Maybe we should go?” I whisper to the Book Buddha.

“Not without doing the deal,” he hisses. “Hey Missus, would you take fifty for the lot?”

“These books contain the collective dark knowledge of a most forbidden art!”

“Sure lads are looking that up online nowadays,” the Book Buddha says. “We're doing you a favour by taking them I reckon.”

“I’m sorry for your troubles ma'am,” Stout Trout says taking the old woman’s hand in his own and kissing it gently. “But you're still a young woman with everything to live for. And a very beautiful woman if I may say so.”

Mrs Mahon smiles and nods gently.

The Book Buddha immediately starts clearing books off the shelves and into cardboard boxes. “I knew we brought that gobshite for a reason.”

It takes nearly two hours to clear the house and load the Passat to the hilt. There’s no golden goose here in the lot but maybe that’s for the best. The real thrill is in the hunt. If we ever found the golden goose, it would probably only kill our love for this life.

Trout emerges from the house covered in lipstick stains, his shirt hanging open. Mrs Mahon waves out the window after him and he blows her a kiss. “Remember,” he says, “You’re still a beautiful woman and a sensual lover.”

“Get in the fecking car,” the Book Buddha roars.

The Bookshop Chronicles Part Zeven: Censorship, gimpsuits and Pooh Bears decadency

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Sodom MacPurity has placed a picket on the bookshop. He’s upset because I barred him for desecrating books in the store. So now he’s marching up and down outside with a placard shouting about blasphemy in literature and communist bookshop owners.

Yesterday I caught Sodom, our local anti imperialist, anti capitalist and anti refugee activist, tipexing out whole sentences in one of my books at the front of the shop.

“What the feck are you at?” I had asked him, brandishing a hardback edition of War and Peace menacingly in my hand.

“I’m removing pro British propaganda from this book,” he had replied. “Before it influences the children in the village and turns them into little West Brits Thatcherites. Not on my watch boy!”

“Ah Jaysus, you’re after destroying that lovely edition of the Jungle book, ya great galoot.”

“Everyone knows Rudyard Kipling was the Goebbels of British colonialism,” Sodom screamed. “And the Jungle Book is a modern day work of Islamic fundamentalist allegory.”

“How can it be a modern day work when it was wrote in the 1890s?”

“If you have any bit of decency in you, you’ll turn a blind eye while I finish amending all of your Kipling’s and Conrad’s.”

“Conrad?” I yelped, pulling a copy of Lord Jim off the shelf. It was covered in tipex marks. Whole sentences eradicated by Sodom MacPurity’s unhinged sense of reality.

“And the others,” he went on. “Rider Haggard, London, Golding, Orwell…”

“Orwell? You can’t tell me you think George Orwell was an imperialist?”

“He was a communist! And a founding member of the New World Order and it’s attempts to wipe out freedom through a combination of feminism, socialism, veganism and Justin Bieber.”

“Oh god,” I muttered. “Any other enduring literary legacies you want to smear in Tipex?”

“AA Milne.”

“The creator of Winnie the Pooh?”

“Absolutely. That bear represents everything that’s decadent in western society. Pooh is a cuckold to the obviously African American Tigger. It’s the blueprint for the great replacement!”

Nobody talks trash about Pooh Bear. That’s when I barred Sodom MacPurity, inadvertently triggering the first boycott in the village since Stout Trout had stopped eating After Eights for ethical reasons.

Now he’s outside, with a handwritten placard which reads; ‘Books can seriously damage your health’. He’s been joined by another young lad with a ponytail, bad acne and a purple turtle neck sweater, who’s harassing passers-by with climate change denial mantras and information about the true nature of the flat earth.

The Legion of Mary, the Anti Austerity Alliance and the Yellow Vests are on the far side of the road, trying to decide whether or not to join the protest. I can hear them growling as they shoulder each other. “Are you joining the protest? If you are, we're not. I’m not protesting with the likes of you.”

“Franz Kafka had carnal relations with a stolen plastic doll,” Sodom is roaring. “James Joyce was a British agent in the second world war. Philip Roth promoted masturbation because he was a member of the elders of Zion.”

Mannie the transgendered feminist arrives in the middle of the protest, dressed in her domantrix costume, leading a frail guy in a black PVC gimp suit on a dog leash. “Don’t worry,” she says when she catches sight of my mouth hanging open. “I’ve come to help you by mounting a counter protest, even though you are a misogynist pig with no understanding of the trials and tribulations faced by discriminated minorities like myself.”

The gimp pulls his mouth zip open. “Hello Bookman,” comes the unmistakable voice of honest Abe.

“Abe, what are ya doing in that gimp suit?”

“It’s not a gimp suit,” Abe sighs. “This a fire retardation suit. I used to wear it when I was fighting forest fires in Australia. The airforce would drop me in front of the flames with nothing but me fire retardation suit, a fire extinguisher and an axe. Many a time I saved thousands of lives with this suit.”

“Quiet slave,” Mannie the transgendered feminist screams, pulling hard on his leash.

“Look it, how exactly are you going to improve this situation?” I ask.

“By mounting a counter protest, you ungrateful prick,” Mannie the transgendered feminist says. “I abhor the censorship of books, except when we’re censoring misogynists and toxic masculinity nuts like Hemingway, Mailer, Bukowski and Kerouac.”

“I like all those writers!”

“My point exactly,” Mannie the transgendered feminist pouts. “But I’ll still save your old fashioned arse because you’re cheaper than Easons.”

Outside Sodom has climbed up onto one of our outdoor bookcases and is roaring at passing cyclists. “Books pervert the human mind! Look at de Sade and DH Lawrence. Look at Nabokov and that witch lover Satanist JK Rowling! Look at Hitler and his final solution.”

“Jaysus, is he blaming the bookshop for the holocaust?” I whisper.

Mannie the transgendered feminist sighs. “Don’t be such an egotist Bookman. He’s not blaming your little shop for the deaths of six million Jews. He’s just blaming it on books in general.”

“I would say being accused of being anti Semitic might damage business Bookman,” Honest Abe grins. “But you’ve already got no customers.” He sniggers harshly until his leash is pulled hard again.

Mannie the transgendered feminist drags Honest Abe outside and, setting up a few feet away from Sodom MacPurity, begins to sing ‘Say it loud – I’m black and I’m proud’. She’s completely out of tune and murdering James Brown’s classic, while Honest Abe flosses behind her, like an elderly gimp version of Baz from the Happy Mondays.

An eerie silence as fallen over Sodom, the Legion of Mary, the AAA and the Yellow Vests as the atrociously mangled words of Brown’s civil liberty track drones out across the village. The only other noises are the grind of Abe’s PVC pants as he gyrates and the unmistakable sound of yellow vests getting sick.

Sodom looks shell-shocked. He quickly approaches Mannie when she finally finishes and attempts to break into an encore with No Doubts ‘Just a girl’ and catches her hand. “Your voice,” he stutters. “It’s like an angels. You’re gorgeous.”

“I know,” Mannie the transgendered feminist says, flicking her hair and tugging hard on Abe’s chain.

“Will we go for a drink?”

“You’re buying though,” she says, letting him lead her down the road to the pub hand in hand, her other hand dragging Abe along behind them.

After awhile the others disperse, clearly distraught that there was no protest. The young lad with the pony tail and bad acne comes into the shop and buys a Nelson Mandela biography.

He’s pleasant enough until I ask for the money. “I can get it cheaper in the charity shop,” he curses.

"There’s no entertainment like this in a charity shop.”

He thinks about this and grudgingly hands over the two euro. “Bloody smut peddler,” he hisses under his breath as he leaves the shop.

The picket ends and I’ve made two euro. I go outside and clean up the Yellow vest vomit.