From origin stories to romance (we’ll get there), my life, in many ways, has been defined by bookshops. The first book I remember buying with my own money — the first grown-up book, at least, if you call it that — was The Penguin Book of Horror Stories, hardback no less, in a secondhand bookshop in Tralee which no longer exists and the name of which, if I ever knew it, has faded into the mists of time.

Was this the book that set me on my trajectory as a writer? Perhaps. Books feature in more than one of my short stories and are a heavy element in the novel I’m writing. I’ve adapted the headline for this column from Henry James’s classic ghost story. Regardless, my bibliomania is likely of my own volition.

Growing up there was Waterstones, of course, and Eason. But I spent far, far more time and money in Vibes & Scribes or the now-departed Connolly’s near Paul Street Shopping Centre. First encounters with the likes of David Eddings, Arthur C Clarke, Bram Stoker, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. My copy of Frankenstein is hand dated by me as 2002, and the price tag is still on it: €3. I long ago lost track of when I started building my library of cheap classics through the stacks at Connolly’s, or the secondhand Stephen King books I accumulated with speed at Vibes & Scribes.

Had the owner of Connolly’s not retired I would still be sinking money into its rarer titles. And it’s only in recent years that I learned perhaps a dozen Verling great-granduncles and great-grandaunts were baptised in the nearby church, SS Peter and Pauls, just up from their home on Cornmarket St. Evidently I was always going to be drawn to the area.

My library is a lesson in exploring personal interests that grow, contract, and explode in new directions as life goes off on its various adventures

Sometimes I think of my poor children when they inherit everything from the leatherbound collection of world classics to out-of-print paperbacks to beautiful editions of HP Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson (thanks to my wife for those). I like to think of it as passing on collected knowledge, even if they’ll have to read my PhD and assorted fiction writings as part of the deal (sorry kids).

When I lived in Abu Dhabi, my abundance of free time in a strange land saw me, perhaps inevitably, gravitate toward the nearest bookshop. It was the vaguely Irish-sounding Magrudy’s in Al Wahda Mall, which is still going strong as part of a wider local chain of shops and, it turns out, got its name because its Emirati founders felt both Arabic and English speakers could pronounce it easily. Didn’t matter. I still spent chunks of my salary in it on everything from science fiction to Arab history. So many, in fact, that I had to ask a friend to ship some of them to me because I couldn’t fit them in my luggage when I moved back. I still use the carpet mousepad and bookmark I picked up there.

Romance amid the rain

I’ve given you an origin story and adventure, but I promised you romance didn’t I?

So: picture this. A couple in their late 20s are on a break in Kilkenny. He’s gearing up to propose and she’s guessed it, but not let on (to him at least).

It rains the first day there and so his plan is not going to plan, not helped by the fact he doesn’t have an actual set in stone plan beyond doing it properly, whatever properly means.

The second day they’re at Kilkenny Castle, visiting the gardens in between showers, the sunken ones at the front down the steps. The rain threatens to come back and as they leave he spins her around on the steps to ask her.

Spoiler alert: She says yes.

Spoiler alert 2: There was no plan beyond this.

The drizzle starts again while they enter a soft bubble of themselves and the giddiness of not quite knowing what to do next, or when they’re going to tell people, or whether they should keep it to just to themselves until they get home (they did).

They duck out from under the trees once the rain lessens. They only get to the end of the street and across the road when the rain comes down heavily, so they look for a place to duck into. And that place is … the Book Centre.

Don’t ask me what I might have bought there, because there was the little matter of my fiancee saying yes to actually process. No doubt I did buy something because, well, it’s a bookshop. And in a building dating from the 1790s, and possibly long before, it seems fitting that a historian and a history teacher should find it the ideal place to wait out the rain.

It’s gone well since; it was our 13th wedding anniversary this week. We’ve been back to Kilkenny more than once since, and we’ve purposely gone in there each time. You can’t beat the romance of bookshops.

David O’Mahony is assistant editor with the Irish Examiner, a historian, and a short story writer