I wasn't in Eason's of O'Connell Street some days back when Patricia Scanlan, with the aid of three hundred hot-air balloons, helped to celebrate "the rejuvenation of a great institution".
The quote is from the explanatory press release I received and the great institution in question was that birthday standby, the book token, but I don't understand why it needed any rejuvenation given that over £2 million was spent on book tokens in Ireland last year - a healthy enough figure, I'd have thought.
Still, if Guinness and Coca Cola and such other commercial giants constantly feel the need to spend large fortunes re-advertising and re-marketing their products every few months, I suppose that book tokens, which are now sixty-five years in existence, feel entitled to be given a facelift as well. And thus there are lots of snazzy new cards to choose from, redeemable at most bookstores around the country.
But that initiative pales into insignificance compared with what's being planned for April 23rd next - on that day (Shakespeare's birthday) every single schoolgoer in Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland will be given a £1 book voucher in what the Booksellers Association triumphantly calls "the biggest celebration of books ever seen in Ireland and the UK".
The aim is to emphasise the importance of reading, for both learning and pleasure, and pupils between the ages of five and eighteen will be able to put their vouchers towards the cost of any book - or simply buy one of those excellent Penguin Popular Classics or Wordsworth Classics, which only cost £1 anyway.
An autobiography by Van Morrison seems a contradiction in terms, given that the man has always let his songs to the talking for him and is hardly ever coaxed into public utterance, except by Michelle Rocca, whose questions he did consent to answer in a newspaper interview last year.
But apparently an autobiography is on the way, and at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, various publishers were vying for the rights to it. £500,000 was the last figure I heard being mentioned, but I imagine it will go for higher than that.
Not as high, though, as the rights being offered for Elton John's inmost thoughts - £10 million is the sum being bandied around here. I hope that the resulting book will be worth it - in other words, that it will be less self-indulgent, preening and incestuous than the intimate television profile made about him last year by his lover. Talk about cringe-making.
Who would be Poet Laureate? Required to come up with occasional dutiful stuff about royal birthdays and anniversaries and such-like, it's no wonder that Philip Larkin didn't want the job - though having written about "that day when Queen and Minister/And Band of Guards and all/Still act their solemn-sinister/Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall" made him an unlikely candidate anyway.
So why would Ted Hughes, another unlikely candidate, have agreed to take on the job - especially when he is still at the height of his powers, as his recent translation of Ovid demonstrates? It can't be the money, which is a pittance; it can't be the imaginative challenge, though composing a convincing paean of praise to any of the current crop of Royals would certainly pose such a challenge.
Yet he does it, and even lends his Poet Laureate weight to other ventures - such as an ode to the Gidleigh Park Hotel in Devon, which that establishment's owner, Paul Henderson, is using in a brochure for the place.
Mr Henderson says: "Ted Hughes has been a regular visitor here over the past twelve years. We have become friends, which is why I could ask the Poet Laureate to write a poem for our brochure." And what does he think of the poem? "It's doggerel," Mr Henderson says. Well, actually it is, but with friends like that . . .
I see that Cork-born Patrick Galvin has been shortlisted for one of the five Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards to Poets, which are worth £15,000 each. Among the eighteen other shortlisted poets are John Burnside, Elaine Feinstein, Elizabeth Jennings, Peter Porter and Peter Reading, and the announcement of the eventual winners will be made later this month.