David O'Mahony: The romance of certain old bookshops

My life, in many ways, has been defined by bookshops

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 - 1851). Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I am a man of relatively few vices. Coffee is my main one. Really loud metal music is another. But books are the guaranteed way to both my heart and my bank balance.

With Cork gaining a pop-up bookshop at Mercier Press in St Luke’s just as Dublin’s Liberties — five minutes from where my great-great grandfather Michael Dunne and his family lived in the late 1800s — loses its Books at One, it’s a reminder not only of the fine line these shops straddle in staying afloat, but of their quiet influence in shaping the people who treasure them.