Marsh’s Library, Dublin

As a child, I dreamed one day of owning, or perhaps just prowling around, an overtowering library.

Shelves would reach beyond my eyes, with creaky ladders required to reach the top.

Sunlight would shimmer through dust and romance, and science and wild adventure would swim between the thick, creamy pages where black ink bled into soft and yellowed parchment.

Well, in 21^st century Dublin I found the library of my dreams, flirting behind flighty leaves and wrought iron gates and a steep if unspectacular staircase.

Dublin’s Oldest

Marsh’s Library lives in the heart of Dublin, admitting the public for a fee with supervision or throwing open its doors for free for the excellent Open House Dublin event .

Founded in 1707, it’s Ireland’s oldest public library and it offers a flight through the history of reading and literature before the digital age.

Literary Giants

Many a literary giant used to study here, with recorded visits from Bram Stoker, James Joyce and Jonathan Swift.

Joyce took memories of the library further, by furnishing his novels with the library reborn, while Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels and the former dean of St Patrick’s cathedral around the corner, took things a little further.

In jagged inky letters bound tight with suppressed tension, he gives his views on the Scots in the margin of The History of the Great Rebellion. And let me tell you, dear readers, for a man of the cloth, he was unforgiving when it came to the betrayal of his beloved king.

Travel and Conflict

Another quiet example of conflict comes in the form of delicate hand drawn maps from a time, and then a world, far away.

Visiting officials from Japan halted at the manuscript. Magnifying glasses unsheathed, backs bent and eyes squinted as the corps searched for a certain disputed island in the South China Sea.

Happily, this century old document seemed to back the claims of Japan and so a diplomatic incident was avoided.

Not so funny now…

It struck me, walking around and drinking in the history, how the prism of space and time distorted my interpretation of events. This map, drawn centuries ago, and this dispute, so far from home, seemed little more than a curiosity, an eccentric event that bordered on comic at the thought of grown men bickering back and forth about the fate of a tiny island.

The Maps of Ireland

Come forth to the here and now and ever forth to the ground I was standing on and it immediately became clear how unfunny such bickering can be.

Grown men – and women – have not laughed off such disputes when it comes to the islands between the Atlantic and France.

At peace now – to a cautious extent – memories of the violence never seems far away in Dublin.

And Marsh’s Library shows by far the most subtle example of this…

Memories of Violence

At first the row of books looks normal.

At second glance, the scuffing becomes clear, the ragged edged hole that signifies a bullet.

The keeper pulls the book from the shelf, creasing the spine to lay it open.

Inside the book, as in the body, and it would seem a people’s psyche, words are torn and spread apart.

Fighting Over a Small Island

The bullet itself comes, inevitably, from a clash over the ownership of Ireland.

Marsh’s Library itself was never under direct attack, making this destruction even more poignant.

Nothing stays safe during war, crossfire affects everyone.

To the keeper’s great credit, this book does not form the centrepiece of the visit.

“We use it to show children,” he says, “to let them know the real effects of bullets. And to show that there’s nothing cool about fighting. That the effects of these bullets are real.”

What now?

I’ve heard many theories both here and during my lifetime as a child on both sides of this painful chapter of history.

But Dublin looks forward now, as well as back, making a name for itself as a a cooler silicon valley with a backdrop of swirling Guinness and a reputation for having a good time.

Creative and daring youngsters return for the rise of the Celtic Tiger as the post recession years begin to ease.

Cool fashion houses, renovated marketplaces and even a big blue bus stick a shamrock in the eye of the Ireland world view spread by the success of Angela’s Ashes.

But back in Marsh’s Library, I’m glad to see that looking back isn’t always painful.

In two staid dimensions, medieval parchments tell tales of travel, of exploration and of friendship between foreigners.

In other words, the more usual sequence of events when humans travel.

Old Postcards

I recognise certain landmarks and catch the keeper’s eye.

“It’s Venice,” he tells me. “And this is one of the oldest postcards in the world.”

Disclosure – I travelled to Dublin as part of the Must Love Festivals project. As you can see here, not all festivals involve music and mud!

Would you visit a library when you travel?