To understand the love between the seller of a book and the person who covets it, we have to look to the fictional characters of the famous JR Hartley (from the 1980s Golden Pages ad ) or Helen Hanff from the classic 84 Charing Cross Road.
It goes far beyond the monetary reward of a sale. It gives the seller a sense of having connected something with someone. It gives the buyer the thrill of having carried out a hunt that had a successful conclusion.
Out at Lydican, Claregalway in an unlikely warehouse sit 500,000 books, dating back over the centuries. In here, you will not find the latest best-sellers from the top of the charts. The Ross O'Carroll Kelly or the Sally Rooneys, but instead, are tomes which cover the widest range of genres and topics.
To the owner of MW Books, Galway-native Jim Shaughnessy, it is a role akin to a speed-dating host in that he locates the books from collections and then tries to match them with someone who is spending their life looking for a particular volume. Traditionally, they are an academic library supplier who export 99% of their stock, mainly to Europe, North America and increasingly the Far East.
When Jim recently showed me around the facility for the purpose of this article, I was astounded by the sheer volume (excuse the pun ) of the business. Climate-controlling dehumidifying units are in place to ensure that modernity does not wear away the tens of millions of precious pages, many of which were printed in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Many are on a shelf awaiting to be reunited with someone who will fully appreciate them.
Here Jim Shaughnessy is a bundle of energy in this vast space. He and his team of ten workers beaver away ensuring that the description of the contents of each book is documented across the likes of eBay so that a searcher looking for volumes on a particular topics can find their Holy Grail.
For two decades at the helm of this business, Jim has been a unique character, surrounded by rich bookcases, succulent bindings and pages from across the Ages. Books always played a key role in his house when he was younger. Before this venture, he had been doing some work with the English Department at the University of Galway but wanted more from the printed page.
"A lot of the texts I was looking to find just weren't in print and weren't available. So I was naturally drawn to out of print antiquarian bookshops. I just got the bug, I was fairly badly bitten by it actually and then when my first daughter was born, she's 20 this month, I just had a kind of naive romantic idea they want to spend as much time with her as I possibly could. The bills just started piling up so after about two or three months, I had to do something.
"And books were kind of what I was interested in and what I knew, or, as it turned out, what I didn't know. So we started trading some of the stuff that we had in the house. And very quickly, the bedrooms were filled, and we were looking for a couple of people. And then we started looking for warehousing, and it mushroomed very quickly to 10 of us here now, and 500,000 volumes,
Labour of love
"It's really a labour of love, and it's something I love doing, and it's a privilege, and we don't necessarily take that for granted. It's a lucky person who can get up in the morning and look forward to what they're doing.
While there is an element of treasure hunt in the business, in that a rare priceless gem might turn up in a collection purchased, it is the satisfaction of finding a customer and matching them with a rare book that is most rewarding.
"It is that sort of wonder that informs our selection; that we do deliberately go after the more unusual material. I suppose people are doing the more standard bookselling so well in bookshops that we just had to carve a certain niche there and that's what I love. It's the aspect that I most like about the job; every day's a school day, genuinely, you're coming in here, and there's stuff on subjects, historically contemporary subjects, that you wouldn't necessarily have a clue about."
I look around Jim's wonderland of rare books and suggest to him that there are books here that he will never get to know; that might be here all his working life, given that the job of matching them with a willing owner may go on forever.
"Yes, but that puts a bit of humility on you as well, reminds you that there many things you will never know, which is actually a good thing.
"That is the constant challenge. We put an awful lot of work into book selection. First of all, despite the huge inventory, we put much more work into actual data presentation. We do a lot of work with the British library, the US Library of Congress, just in terms of the accuracy and the importance of the data. So it's a very labour intensive process. But much more importantly then, is the kind of the post data production where you're actually trying to find an audience for the book.
"And there's a lot of work goes into that, an increasing amount of amount of attention as well. We work with third party seller services. eBay would be a big one, actually, and they're very good at aligning our eclectic inventory with the international audience. Books on conservation going to Romania; some stuff on Bolivian independence movements in Spanish published in Caracas in the 1970s that's going to Italy. So there's a lot of diversity in the inventory, and we use those external kind of marketing tools quite well to ensure those who want them get them."
eBay plays a pivotal role in supporting Irish SMEs like MW Books in their international growth, simplifying the export process through tools like eBaymag. It connects millions of buyers and sellers across 190 markets, empowering everyone, regardless of identity or location, to expand and prosper.
Long lost dog
"Those who are buying the material particularly the ones of a more unusual nature that they've been searching for a long time, when they find it, it is almost like finding a long lost dog. The satisfaction they get from actually acquiring it really makes your day."
The letter writing between book-buyer and book-seller as characterised in 84 Charing Cross Road still continues, although in a different format," Jim tells me.
"It's not dissimilar to what we're doing now, the nature of how we correspond obviously has changed, but the change has greatly enhanced the experience, I think, despite the drawbacks about data matching and the kind of shipping requirements. But essentially, the concept of bringing something that is required, to the person who needs it on the other side of the world is very satisfying.
"When the sales potential of these books depends on the data management of the description of the content that is then displayed to the readers globally, you see the labour intensity of the business.
"We put the same amount of descriptive and data management effort into a ten euro book as we do with a 10,000 euro book. The person buying a 10 euro book is going to need that information as much as anyone else. The idea that we have that kind of uniformity across the whole catalogue regardless of value, is something that I like," beams Jim.
Jim is part of a community of booksellers who are informed of new collections coming up for sale and he travels in the UK and Europe to search for books and manuscripts that he thinks are unusual enough to have a nice loyalty in the mind of a buyer somewhere in the world.
Being part of a Europe-wide dealer network is vital. If collections become available and a dealer isn’t interested, they pass that information on and Jim gets to see what piques his interest. With the State now almost a century old, the country 'big house' book collections have almost all been curated, but due to the dissipation of many of the artefacts from that time, antiquarian Irish books often pop up in the most unusual places.
To ensure that books end up with those who appreciate them, he paid tribute to his staff for their enthusiasm for books and for learning. Versed in book history and binding types, many of his team are graduates of a publishing programme in the University of Galway.
Although the technology that enables Jim's business is based on technology, he does not fear for the future of the book and print industry and believes that books and newspapers will thrive due to their tactile and experiential qualities.
One hopes so. Coming into work in the morning and seeing the emails and the eBay queries and orders and being set the challenge of finding a book for a customer drive Jim and his team on. Equally, finding a good home for a tome that has been sitting on a shelf gives similar satisfaction. And so the dating goes on in the strong belief that there's a good home for every tome.
To see the vast range of eclectic stock that sit on Jim's shelves, see www.mwbooks.ie
