Second-hand bookshops are a bit like elderly relatives, writes Frank McNally. Full of stories, many of which you've heard before, they always have something new to tell you, if only you spend enough time with them.
Then one day they're gone, and you can only regret that you didn't visit more often.
So it is with Greene's of Dublin, which passes away peacefully this week at the age of 164. The shop and its book-barrows have been part of the furniture in Clare Street for so long you hardly noticed them any more. But the barrows will be carried inside (they have no wheels) for the last time on Friday and the street will seem a little barer next week.
When I dropped by yesterday to pay my respects, the atmosphere was businesslike rather than funereal, thanks to a closing-down sale. As the shelves emptied, however, they were not being refilled. Climbing the stairs to the first-floor, you really did feel as if you were attending a wake, and that for the sake of decency the blinds should have been drawn.
The shop's manifesto posted on the wall looked sad, including, as it did, the assurance that visitors were welcome just to browse. Maybe too many of us had exercised this option over the years, I thought guiltily. Then I remembered that the relationship between second-hand bookshops and browsers is similar to that between spiders and flies, and the guilt lifted.
On my previous visit to Greene's, I now recalled, I bought a book called A Tour of the Darkling Plain.This was no less than a collection of letters about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, exchanged over a quarter of a century between Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen, two Joycean anoraks who made a life's hobby out of deciphering the book's riddles and writing to each other with their latest discoveries. I swear.
It was about the size of a brick, even in paperback. But buying it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was certainly good value, at a tenner. And yet somewhere between the shop and home the imperative to read it immediately had deserted me. When last I noticed it was still on the floor of the car, from where it has since disappeared, presumably under the front seat.
No, the demise of Greene's was not my fault (whatever about yours). In any case, "demise" is overstating it. The business is not dead. Its corporeal presence is departing this world - or at least Dublin 2 - for somewhere in Sandyford. But its soul is ascending into cyberspace, following a path already trod by Kenny's of Galway and other independent book dealers who now find it more economical to trade over the internet.
Like the old Bewleys cafés, the shop on Clare Street had become almost a loss leader for a business much of which was elsewhere. As well as its online antiquarian sales, Greene's has a lucrative business supplying libraries and schools, which will continue. Even so, it's depressing that the streets of Dublin and Galway cannot support shops that elsewhere would be tourist attractions.
Take Shakespeare & Co in Paris, for example. It's not nearly as old as Greene's and yet it has become almost as much of an institution on the banks of the Seine as the nearby Notre Dame. For me, no trip to the French capital is complete without at least a few minutes among those crowded shelves.
No doubt I'm romanticising it. But on my very first visit to Shakespeare & Co, I was invited upstairs for tea by its already legendary proprietor, George Whitman. This was not unusual. Whitman was even known to offer lodgings to some of the assorted students, writers and chancers passing through his doors, in return for a few hours' work. In any case, it proved good business. Despite not being invited for tea since, I always return to the shop when in Paris and rarely leave without a book.
Whitman is 93 now and a few years ago he handed over the business to his 20-something daughter (having a 20-something daughter at the age of 93 being not the least of his achievements). But he can still be seen pottering around the place or sitting out front, his wild white hair lending credence to his occasional claims to be descended from the poet Walt. Long synonymous with his shop, he has recently endured the trauma of being turned into a metaphor, in a TV documentary entitled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man. Of course, Shakespeare & Co is itself a reminder that bookshops go out of business occasionally, even famous ones, and even in Paris. It was modelled on and later named after an older business, the one owned by Sylvia Beach and frequented by Joyce, Hemingway and others.
Before she died in 1962, Beach was sufficiently convinced of Whitman's credentials to bequeath some of her books and the naming rights. The favour was returned in the name of his daughter: Sylvia Beach Whitman. So that even in a different premises, the spirit of the older store lives on.
A similarly romantic twist in the story of Greene's appears unlikely. The Clare Street shop has always shared a city block with Leinster House, and in a poignant coincidence, it will be consigned to history alongside the 29th Dáil. By tea-time on Friday, just as the shape of the next Government begins to emerge, Greene's will be eliminated from Dublin south central. There will be no chance of a recount.