Galway is a city on the edge of the ocean and on the edge of Europe. Here, on the west coast of Ireland, the rain-swollen Corrib surges past granite bridges on the way to the Atlantic. For generations, Spanish boats docked here to unload wines and citrus fruits. This was also where Christopher Columbus rested the night before sailing to America.

Under Galway’s fickle sun, with its serene pale light shining through low lying clouds, gray and heavy with rain, a nomadic mélange of tourists, immigrants, and students flow through its streets everyday. At some point, most of them end up at Charlie Byrne’s Secondhand Bookshop, a meeting space on Middle Street.

I spent three years working at Charlie Byrne’s, described by its customers as the best bookshop in Europe. “Is Charlie Byrne real?” travelers would ask us. “Are you Charlie Byrne?” they’d ask Vinny, Charlie’s longtime friend and manager. Charlie, a nomad himself, was an archeologist who worked for years on excavations in Dublin, Cork, and Galway, before opening his bookstore in 1989. Today he travels all over the US, Britain, and Ireland in search of books on history, architecture, crime, biography, film, archeology, and literature.

Growing up in Longford, Charlie would go with his dad, who loved to buy books at auctions, to all the secondhand bookstores in Dublin. “Our house was full of books. I liked the idea of the secondhand shop—where you never knew what you were going to come across,” Charlie told me at one Christmas party as we drank pints of black porter topped with laurels of cream. So, he put down his trowel and started selling books at a weekend market while “digging” for books during the week. Since then, his bookstore has served as a crossroads for travelers from around the world.

In ancient Ireland, crossroads, where two or more roads met in the windswept countryside, were worshipped as magical. At crossroads, sacred rituals and dances were performed and highwaymen were buried. These liminal spaces, ascribed with sacred powers of protection and healing, were believed to be in-between places where the spirit world encroached on the world of man, and where one could access the Otherworld. At crossroads, holy men and women could walk between worlds and were guardians of these “cosmic axes” which allowed inter-world travel. Charlie Byrne’s feels like a sacred meeting place where different worlds, cultures, and ideas come together through a discovered book or a chance encounter; a space where nomads of all types find solace, company, and muted conversation. Travelers dropped in to buy cheap copies of the Butcher Boy or the latest Roddy Doyle novel, but they also came because it’s a third place—somewhere between work and home where they can browse and learn, and seek inspiration and a friendly chat while they skim the spines of other people’s books.

While I worked, moving boxes, cleaning each book with Lysol until it shined, and dusting each one with a paintbrush, I’d eavesdrop on customers. From behind the cash register and around shelf corners, I’d listen to the smiling, rumpled, vagabonds who were drawn to this secondhand bookshop on Middle Street because they saw a kindred soul in Charlie who would sometimes stand at the back counter quietly pricing books he salvaged from someone’s attic. Or, they came for the company of other browsers and readers or for the chance to talk with another customer about Kennelly’s Great Shame or Heaney’s new poetry—or maybe just to daydream.

One young woman spent hours kneeling at the law section in her faded blue jeans and fleece vest. I admired her deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and wide face speculating where she was from. Tibet, Malaysia? She’d only come in to read and research, scribbling pages of notes, while customers and booksellers moved around her. I was surprised when I heard her American accent as she told an interested admirer, an Irish man with a crest of red hair and a shy smile, that her name was Allison. She was a Navajo Indian who grew up on a reservation in Arizona. She was here to do a Master’s in International Law. She told me later that the bookshop reminded her of home—back in the wide, open spaces of Arizona where her house was always vibrant and bustling. She liked to hear the murmur of voices around her, customers and staff talking and laughing. She loved the way the bookshop felt, as if everyone in it were related.

Allison came into the shop again, one Sunday to drop off her entire book collection. I scanned the books, which were in fairly good condition; Land and the Forest-Dwelling South American Indian, The Law and American Indian Grave Protection, and a tattered copy of The Federalist Papers. She was moving back to Arizona and was taking her Irish suitor with her.

Another regular was Bernard, from the south of France, who now lived in Kinvara. He rode a bus for two hours every Saturday to come to Charlie’s although he never bought or read very much. With his round, bald head and large eyes, he looked like a Buddha. He would come through the door and sweep the shop with his eyes, as if he were looking for someone to meet. Nodding hello to Vinny, Bernard would meander around the shop until he bumped into someone he knew.

Sarah once worked in the Peddler, Galway’s first but now defunct secondhand bookshop but now spent most of her spare time at Charlie’s. She walked unaccompanied through India from Kerala to Bombay, traveled to Peru, to Sedona, to the spiritual sites of the world. Sarah became a Reiki master and practiced bio-energy in Moycullen. She loved to come to the shop to read our auras and search through the archeology and spirituality sections for books on stone circles and megalithic burial tombs. Sarah once told me, as I priced secondhand romance novels, how she would go with her friend Pat to search for animal spirits in the fissured, limestone landscape of the Burren in northwest County Clare. Night was the best time.

As Sarah studied pictures of Shelia-Na-Gigs in The Heart of the Goddess, Bernard told her about his trips to the Egyptian pyramids and to Machu Picchu in Peru. He explained how the two places are astrologically aligned with Clonmacnoise in Ireland, and that he was organizing another trip to Egypt… something about opening energy portals…and asked if she’d like to come. Did I hear that right? Energy Portals? It sounded like that as I backed up, stepping on the toes of Sean O’Brien from Belfast.

Sean was a better looking Tim Burton, had an accent like a song, and was an object of my desire. He was a busker and an artist in one. He stood in the street on a wooden box, dressed as a Blues Brother. Standing motionless until a passerby dropped change into a hat, he would start to dance and groove to the music, lithe and loose-limbed. He’d spend most of his lunch break in Charlie Byrne’s.
“Howya Vin,” Sean would say as he walked in with hands in his pockets.
Vinny would look up slowly and say in his full-bodied, friendly way, “Sean, How ya doin’?” sometimes using a mock Brooklyn accent.

Sean loved the quietness of the shop, which allowed him to escape the noise and crowds of the street. He’d leaf through books on the Stanislavsky Method or a biography on Charles Laughton. Ever since he was eleven Sean dreamed of becoming an actor. Now, years later in Charlie’s, with each jolt of inspiration, he found his way back to what he always knew. That summer of 2004, his daily trips to Charlie’s helped him to make the decision: he was going to New York City to become an actor.

Grant was a young black man from a small village in the Congo who moved to Ireland in the late nineties to escape the war. An accomplished drummer, he was now learning to master the Bodhran. He wanted to be an Irish musician and in Charlie’s he read about Irish instruments and by night he played in a local pub, the Crane, where he was welcomed by other musicians. To help pay his rent, he offered African drumming classes. He would advertise by pinning his flyers to the communal notice board in Charlie’s.

Sister Josephine was an 82-year-old nun originally from Galway who at sixteen joined the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and was sent to Pakistan to work in an orphanage. In her seventies she was sent home to spend the summers in Ireland because it was too hot in the lowlands of Pakistan. She’d come in to the shop taking short steps and smiling to herself. She’d buy bags of thrillers and crime paperbacks from Stephen King to James Lee Burke. Vinny would greet her as she came in “Sister, welcome home! Don’t worry—the Pope hasn’t called in here for a while.” She liked the people in Charlie’s because we accepted her and her love for crime novels. At Charlie’s, she could embrace different aspects of herself.

Thousands of nomads come to Galway every year seeking inspiration, discovery, and ultimately transformation. They’re drawn to Charlie Byrne’s because they are offered vicarious adventure and good company; because the friendship between Charlie and Vinny is something people want to be around; because Vinny will call you by name and love you enough to slag you; because Charlie Byrne is a real man you rarely see, but want to; or maybe because that bookshop, with its books stacked high against the walls, stuffed in shelves, and piled on countertops feels familiar, like your grandparents’ attic where you once went digging through as a child, when you dared to be the magician at the crossroads—the walker between worlds—the cosmic traveler who moved lucidly and free on the axis of your imagination.

Adrienne Anifant graduated from Mount Holyoke College. She has an M.A. in English and Writing and an LL.M. in Human Rights and International Law. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews are published in Ireland, England and the U.S. She lives in New York City.

Photo by: Francesco Alesi

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i “The Enchanted Crossroads.” Rogers, Liam. http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/crossroad.htm, 1996. Last viewed September 2007.

ii Slag – form of friendly Irish exchange where the person who slags pokes fun in a humorous fashion

Tags: Charlie Byrne, Galway, Ireland

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