IT IS lunchtime on Saturday and the spring sunshine is making Dalkey Town Hall positively glow. Baskets of tulips outside the florists face boxes of fruit and vegetables on the pavement across the narrow street. Middle-aged men walk about in polo shirts and shorts, and many people walk dogs.
“It is nice town, with nice people. It has been good to our business,” says Michael Simmonds who has decided that, after 35 years, summer time is the best time to close his iconic Exchange Bookshop.
It is not that the business is unprofitable. Cards and gifts are doing very well and the niche market principle of “buy, sell or barter” on which the shop is based, is still capable of being developed, he says.
It is just that profit levels on the books are reducing every year and it is getting more and more difficult to innovate.
Although he professes he has always loved it, the man who has sold and bought books from more than one generation from Harold Boys’ School and others thinks it is time to move on.
“I am near retirement age, people are very kind saying they want me to stay but I don’t want to become a dusty old man, here until I am 90,” he says.
In 1975, when he came to Dalkey and based his business up the road from his premises at number 34, it was different. There was no Amazon, no internet and no competition between paper and digital “readers”.
But even allowing for technology which is changing the news industry and moving literature online, he says people actually reading anything are in decline.
“I still have my regulars. I have a five-year-old boy, Ruairí, who comes in with his dad and gives me a hard time if I don’t have his books,” he smiles.
Despite the decline in readers and the competition from the internet, he has always believed the barter system would work. He wanted to bring in a department store system where people could bring in items – for example a table and chairs – and get credits for them. They could then buy books or anything in other departments.
He applied for a wine licence on the basis that wine and books could be a good match. But he was turned down at the District Court – ironically by Judge Hubert Wine.
Another innovation, an attempt to establish a similar buy, sell or barter book exchange in Rathmines in 1978, almost ruined him. But he remains committed: “The exchange system is really valid. It allowed us to sell the same book over and over again and it makes books really cheap.”
He has started publishing guides to heritage spots. Two he has produced feature reader-friendly information and guided walks for tourists. There are a lot of glossy photographs and maps and they are selling at €2. He explains there is some interest in the business from big book sellers.
He will miss the authors, artists and musicians who are familiar faces in the shop but says, “I do like to operate on my own terms. I am an eccentric.”
