Sleeping with Books

I grew up in a Victorian two-up, two-down terrace house in Limerick City, close to the river. Like most of the houses in the row, it had been extended at the back with the addition of a kitchenette and bathroom; as a result we had a dining room and a separate sitting room on the ground floor. The dining room at the back, overlooking a yard, was also a kind of sitting room where we could watch television in the evenings. By keeping the television in the rear dining room, my father ensured that the other sitting room, our so-called front room, was defended for the perusal of the printed and written word.

As well as being the family house, 3 Osmington Terrace was also the base for Treaty Books, my father Paddy Lysaght's book business. My brother Liam and I were often enlisted to unload books from the car; these had been bought at auction or from individuals in the Limerick and North Munster area. The books would be stacked in the front room before being sorted: items for the next catalogue were put on shelves throughout the house, and a residue was kept for the bookshop that my parents ran from a basement in the city center.

There was one wall of bookshelves in the front room, and another in the back bedroom, which my brother and I shared when we were very young (Liam got his own bedroom later when the large bedroom at the front was divided). The biggest book space of all was in the attic, a surprising gift of the Victorian builders who had provided a third floor for those modest little townhouses. The attic was reached by a set of wooden steps leaning not far off the vertical; the timbers are there to this day with their worn steps, which have held the weight of many a visiting book dealer. When these dealers would visit, they were shown in to the front room on the ground floor, where there was a wall of books to view. After that, they were guided up into the attic. The front room and the attic were a public zone where business was done; the bedrooms and their books remained private.

The attic had never been converted or extended by dormer windows. Its only view of the outside was a small skylight in the roof. Perhaps it was a bookman's instincts that preserved this space for books without interference from light and wasteful glass surfaces. As you looked at the house from the street outside, there was nothing to indicate that hundreds of volumes and all the accoutrements of a mail-order business were accommodated just under its rain-washed slates.

During the early years of the business in the 1960s, my father produced catalogues of books of Catholic interest and, as the attic was not big enough for all the stock, much of the overspill went on the shelves in the back bedroom on the first floor. For a good part of my childhood, as I settled down to sleep, my eye registered such names as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain. These authors' names and book titles across the inner wall of the room were more than motifs on printed paper: they could be taken down and examined. An alternative version of this story would describe a boy avidly reading the books in the room he slept in. As a youngster, I did occasionally dip into an essay by Belloc or Chesterton, but the references and disputes were unfamiliar, the tone of the writing was overbearing or patronizing, and even the spirituality of a Thomas Merton I found thin and remote.

Although I did not realize it at the time, there had been a period in the 1950s when Catholicism, particularly English Catholicism, appeared to be flourishing. Its appeal extended from the world of cinema, where Alec Guinness was a recent convert, through the work of such novelists as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, to the poetic and philosophical world of T. S. Eliot. Before returning to Ireland...