Karin Barry remembers Flann O’Brien’s idea for a book-handling service to make untouched volumes look well-thumbed, while Susanna Hoe offers some of her own books to those with threadbare collections
Your article (Shelf-promotion: the art of furnishing rooms with books you haven’t read, 8 April) reminded me that Myles na gCopaleen (AKA Flann O’Brien), who wrote for the Irish Times, spotted this trend a long time ago and suggested a service that might provide a useful income for today’s impoverished students.
He’d visited the house of a newly married friend – “a man of great wealth and vulgarity” – who’d just “paid some rascally middleman” to stuff his library full of books as “some savage faculty for observation” had told him that respectable people had lots of books.
