BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS

This is our library at the moment. It was once the choir and a lovely one too by all accounts but then St. Bonaventures in Cork closed and the students came here along with the library. When I arrived as a newly solemnly professed friar in 1995 it had been the exclusive domain of an elderly friar until his incarceration in a nursing home. My job then was first to sort out the shelving and then the books. It's hard to believe but here am I on my second stint in Raheny and I'm still trying to sort it out. As we are facing either a redesign/new build scenario with the house it is also important to reduce the library to manageable size. Friars use libraries as dumping grounds. So my principal job has been weeding out the rubbish and reducing the library to its proper function; a resource for students of philosophy and theology. It's not all rubbish. In the past I have found books as old as 1648 (the sermons of St. Anthony of Padua in latin, wax cover) and newer books from the early 18th Cent. Some are beautifully illustrated and many are of particularly Irish interest but that's not what the libraries for. I have removed some books (such as Missalae Romanae to the Common Room). Some books have been given away. I hope to sell off the rest of the books we don't want or need to raise funds to buy more modern texts. It's dirty work but one comes up the occasional jewel such as Micahel Davies' Apologia for Marcel Lefebvre vol. I and The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described, 10th Edition, 1958 by Fortescue and O'Connell. We have the rubbish too - Kung, Haring etc but I'm the librarian not a censor. Stilll books do go missing...