If you've just bought Eamon Sweeney's There'll Always Be a Red Army, hold on to it - in a few years time it might be worth quite a lot of money.
I mention Mr Sweeney's book because its subject is the author's devotion to a soccer club (Sligo Rovers), and a few years ago an unknown hack in London set down his obsession with another soccer club (Arsenal) and now the first edition of that book is worth a modest fortune.
I'm talking, of course, about Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, which on its 1992 publication had a modest print run of 5,200 copies. Since then, the book has sold more than 600,000 copies, but if you're in possession of one of the original 5,200, it's now worth about £500.
You're even better off if you own one of the original hardback editions of Irvine Welsh's 1994 cult novel, Trainspotting. This was considered such a no-hoper before publication that the print run was only 300; now each of these is worth £1,000. And you'll do well, too, with first editions of Minette Walters's The Ice House (£700), Patrick O'Brian's Surgeon's Mate (£600) and Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (£500).
These are figures currently being cited in Britain. What price then, either there or here, Roddy Doyle's The Commitments in its original King Farouk imprint, published by the author himself? Quite substantial, I'd say.
Meanwhile, Hornby has just clinched a £1.8 million deal for the film rights to his new, as-yet-unpublished, novel, About a Boy - Robert de Niro's Tribeca enterprise being the production company that has shelled out this Lotto-sized sum. And to think that a mere five years ago Hornby's friends thought his obsession with the Gunners a ticket to nowhere.
Speaking of first editions, the other day I came across the 1963 first edition of Michael Farrell's posthumously published only novel, Thy Tears Might Cease, in The Secret Book and Record Store on Wicklow Street. It was in almost perfect condition and selling for £5, so I promptly bought it. I also snapped up a hardback reprint of Yeats's 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse (which notoriously excluded Wilfred Owen on the grounds that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry"). In flawless condition, it was selling for £6.
I've mentioned this shop before and no doubt will again, simply because it's one of the few second-hand outlets in Dublin where on a regular basis you can expect to find the unexpected. I rarely come away from it without acquiring something.
In the Irish Film Centre the other evening, Mary Pat Kelly's first novel, Special Intentions, was being launched, and I went along because the only other time I had encountered the author was when she met her future husband.
That was more than a decade ago in the Columbus bar on Manhattan's Columbus Avenue, and I would like to be able to tell you why I and a few friends happened to be there at about 1am, but it was one of those spirited nights that happen sometimes, especially in New York, and my memory of it is slightly blurred, and so I'm afraid I can't.
However, I do recall the actor Raul Julia joining our company for reasons that entirely escape me now, and I also recall this ex-nun who descended on us like a whirling dervish, declared herself to be a friend of Martin Scorsese and yakked away as if there were no tomorrow (there wasn't, as it turned out), and about a year later I learned that this person had married one of our number, New York-based ex-Irish Independent photographer Martin Sheeran.
When I met her in the IFC, Mary Pat hadn't much changed. In fact, she hadn't changed at all. She was still yakking way as if there were no tomorrow, and Martin was still by her side, and it was as if the party had somehow never stopped since that longago night on Columbus Avenue, except that we were all a decade older and life had seen each of us doing very different things.
In Mary Pat's case, it had seen her acting as religious consultant on Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, writing two books (a biography of Scorsese and an account of American soldiers in Ireland during the second World War), and being voted sixty-fifth - no less - most influential Irish-American in the US.
It had also seen her writing the novel that was being celebrated in the IFC. It concerns an idealistic young postulant who wants to save the world and ends up in the middle of the Chicago race riots of the 1960s, but that, as they say, is another story. New Island Books will reveal it to you for £6.99.
If you're in San Francisco's Bay Area next week (well, I don't know, you might be) the city's eighth annual book festival is presenting two sessions of Irish interest. The first, next Saturday, is called "Cherish the Ladies" and it aims to "reclaim the female voice in Irish-American writing". Most of the writers mentioned mean nothing to me, but then I suppose that's partly the point of the session - they're being reclaimed from obscurity.
The second session, entitled "Atlantic Crossing", is about "how one Irish poetry press bridges the diaspora". The press in question is Galway-based Salmon, and among the participants will be Salmon's publisher Jessie Lendennie and Salmon poet Mary O'Malley.
Gerard Fitzpatrick wants me to tell you that entries are now being solicited for the Cork Literary Review's latest poetry and prose competition, the winners of which will be published next year in the magazine's fifth anthology. The distinguished poetry judge is Bernard O'Donoghue, while the equally distinguished judge of prose is David Marcus.
Entry fee is £4 for three poems or two stories, closing date is February 28th next, and application forms can be had by writing to Gerard at Tig Fili, Thompson House, MacCurtain Street, Cork city.