Shelf-raising flour - Frank McNally on a literary facelift for an old Dublin flour mill

As was suggested on Twitter earlier in the week, the old Odlum’s Flour Mill in Dublin Port – soon to be turned into an “artist campus” – is just crying out to be redesigned as a giant bookshelf.

With imaginative paintwork, the nine towering grain silos facing the Liffey could be transformed into a collection of differently coloured book spines, carefully chosen to represent one of the world’s most literary cities.

There is precedent abroad for such a thing. A wall near the City Library in Kansas has the appearance of 22 outsized books side-by-side, although in fact composed of mere mylar panels.

At 25 feet high (7.62m) by 9 feet across (2.74m) each, those add up to what locals claim is the “world’s largest bookshelf”.

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But in your face, Kansas City! If the Odlum’s shelf came to pass, its books would soar to 15 storeys high (by nine stories across, as it were). It would become an instant pilgrimage site for literary selfie – and indeed shelfie – takers.

There might, I admit, be some conceptual problems with this, never mind the possibility that Grafton Architects – now tasked with a feasibility study for the arts campus – may have other ideas.

One drawback is that, by using the existing contours of the silos, the bookshelf would be limited to slim volumes. There could be no Ulysses, for example. It would have to be Dubliners or A Portrait, perhaps alongside Normal People and The Country Girls.

Another problem is that the visual and performance artists who will be using the workspaces behind it might object that such a frontage would perpetuate the tyranny of the printed word, traditionally dominant in Irish arts.

At the very least, the bookshelf would have to include a few plays, by Beckett and whoever. Plays are always slim volumes, which is a bonus, as are poetry collections.

On which score, WB Yeats could be represented by his late-career collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Not only does that include such landmark works as Easter 1916 and The Second Coming, but via the relatively obscure title poem, it would also serve as a nod to the dance community.

The artists aside, marketeers might complain that a giant bookshelf would not accurately convey what the repurposed building is. But then, neither does the one in Kansas. Although connected to the City Library, the bookshelf there hides a carpark.

But all artists read books, surely. And for people in many of the public professions, bookshelves have never been so prestigious as now. Until a few years ago, thanks to Kindle and iPhone, they might have been in danger of dying out. Then the pandemic happened.

And suddenly, everyone everywhere doing TV interviews on Zoom felt naked without a well-stocked bookshelf behind them. There would be no better time to install a gigantic version as part of the backdrop Dublin presents to the world.

No doubt the choice of books would be controversial, as it must have been in Kansas. There, the public nominated favourites and the library chose the final list, ranging from Shakespeare to Harper Lee (although apparently excluding a former reporter for the Kansas City Star, Ernest Hemingway).

But perhaps the Dublin shelf could be rearranged regularly, with new titles voted in every time it needs repainting.

Speaking of which, I see that a recent visitor to the Kansas one complained of “fraying” on the mylar panels. It’s unclear if this was planned. And yet ideally, the items on a real bookshelf should show, if not fraying, at least signs of use.

Perhaps, in homage to Myles na gCopaleen’s “Book-Handling” service for the well-to-do illiterate, the Odlum’s Volumes could be similarly distressed, and have bus tickets and other page markers sticking out at the top.

With skilled paintwork, a few spines might even show the results of savage mauling, as carried out (for a steep fee) by Myles’s master handlers.

***

This may be as good a place as any to mention the next conference of the International Flann O’Brien Society, the “call for papers” to which has just gone out.

Following events in Vienna, Rome, Prague, Salzburg, Dublin (of all places), and Boston, the choice of venue for the 2023 instalment demonstrates conclusively that nowhere is safe from Irish literature.

It takes place next June in Cluj, second city of Romania and first of Transylvania, an ancient region that was minding its own business, happily oblivious to Ireland, until 125 years ago this year, when another Dublin writer made it the setting for Dracula.

This may have influenced the theme of the 7th FOB conference, which is “Strange Atmospheres”. Scholars are invited to submit papers under a range of related sub-themes, including “Gothic spaces”, “ghost cities”, and “literary discourse and the weather”. The deadline for abstracts is December 15th.