The Oxfam Bookshop on Parliament St
There are quite a few charity shops around Dublin. They seem to congregate in little clumps about the city. There’s a string of them in Ranelagh, a brace or two on Thomas St, a cluster in Rathmines, and a troop of them on Capel St. Irish charity shops are not particularly impressive compared to American thrift stores and there is a strong possibility that if you are visiting the city you are doing it for reasons other than a desire to buy old cardigans and chipped commemorative dinner plates. On the other hand, you may well be in the market for some reading material and there are a couple of charity shops which specialise in books.
One of these is the Oxfam shop in Rathmines, but more central and better stocked is the Oxfam bookshop in Parliament St, just off Dame St and right near Temple Bar. There’s not much to it, really, just a relatively clean and relatively well-lighted place for homeless books. It’s the nature of a charity shop that the stock changes fairly rapidly and without any real design, but if you can’t bear the idea of reading the bleedin’ Da Vinci Code left behind in your hotel room, you might spend a profitable hour checking out what’s on offer here. Since all the workers there are volunteers, it is not necessarily the most efficiently run establishment in the city (which, without wishing to sound unpatriotic, is saying something), but you can find a decent range of contemporary and popular fiction, proper literature, books of Irish interest and music. There are also a few rare books and records, but these tend to be over-priced, seemingly on the assumption that is something is old it is worth a lot of money. People make the same mistake about me.
