Seamus Murphy's unpretentious little book, by now more than half-a-century old, has quietly but firmly hollowed out a niche for itself and has become a kind of off-centre classic. Murphy, a well-known sculptor and a much-loved man who was also one of the key cultural personalities of Cork for decades, records a vanished Ireland and above all a vanished class - the "stonies", the migrant stonecarvers and stone-workers among whom he served his time while in his teens. They were old-style artisans, with little education in the formal sense but men who had "knocked about" most of Ireland as part of their profession and were full of local lore, chat, folk wisdom and the inbred traditions of their highly demanding craft. The widespread use of cement largely killed off them and their kind, but they left their mark and their handicraft all around the country in churches, public buildings and monuments, even in domestic architecture. Whether Murphy took down notes on the quiet or had an outsize memory, his recreation of their talk - sometimes genial, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes quarrelsome, but always rich and idiomatic - would do a professional dramatist or scriptwriter credit. Above all, the book is full of humour and the characters themselves come alive - the Gargoyle, Tomit, Stun, Danny Melt, etc. This edition carries black-andwhite illustrations by William Harrington and each chapter begins with a capital letter designed by Murphy himself, who in this field was a kind of Irish Eric Gill.