The red candles burning merrily away in the mullioned windows give the game away. There's a party going on - sssshh! The offices of the Lilliput Press are packed to the gills in double-quick time. Soon it's wall-to-wall writers and one or two others.
"It's more Brobdingnagian than Lilliputian given the people present," says Welshborn Jonathan Williams, literary agent to about 80 writers. The occasion is Lilliput's Christmas party - and the relaunch of Anthony Cronin's Dead as Doornails, which has been out of print. He explains that he's "in deep conversation" with the writer and critic Professor Terence Brown.
Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, has come along to "enjoy a pint of Guinness and to buy my friend's book," he says, introducing us to Jane Falloon - and her book, Throttle Full Open: A Life of Lady Bailey, Irish Aviatrix. Falloon, once the wife of the northern politician, Sir Robin Chicester-Clark, has been married to Paddy Falloon for 22 years. "He's 88," offers the knight, "and he's got a razorsharp intellect." Paddy, who is out of ear-shot, does indeed look razor-sharp - from a dress point of view at any rate.
Antony Farrell, founder of Lilliput Press, introduces us to "the new Alice Taylor" in the unlikely shape of Rory O'Connor, a former head of TV news in RTE who is looking forward to his memoirs, Gander at the Gate, being published in the spring.
Artist Michael Kane is here with his wife, architect Shelly McNamara. Actor Tom Hickey has come along also. Others enjoying the party include photographer Bill Doyle and literary agent Faith O'Grady, who is chatting to Professor Terry Eagleton about his new play - "a searing satire," he explains, "about Yeats and Maude Gonne who smokes a cheroot and says words like `scum'." One wonders what Professor Lawrence Taylor, a New Yorker who is head of anthropology at NUI Maynooth, makes of it all. His own book, Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics, was published four years ago.
Last in the door is Philip Casey, author of The Fabulists, who says his up-coming book is "a drama of exile" set in London of the 1950s. "I used to play in the bomb sites," explains Casey, beginning to look about him at coats and glasses and people in higgledy-piggledy order at the party - a scene reminiscent of those long gone days.