“This book makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.” This is the encouraging opening of a review of Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography, by Rand Brandes and Michael A. Durkan which appeared in the ever-gripping Irish Times Weekend Review in mid-August. The book certainly isn’t for the casual browser. For one thing, see above and for another look at the price: £50. Why a book like this would be reviewed – and at some length – in a daily newspaper would be a mystery if it were not for the talisman quality of the name: famous Seamus Heaney.

The publisher of the book is Faber but the Irish are no slouches when it comes to expensive tomes either. The same edition of the paper carries a review of The John McGahern Yearbook (Volume 1), edited by John Kenny and published by NUI Galway (or UCG for older readers, or a University Press for readers outside Ireland). It has all of 152 pages (compared to the Heaney bibliography’s 527) and costs €50. You’ll have to put in a good few hours down the chipper to afford that one. There is also a review of a special issue, devoted to Benedict Kiely, of the Irish University Review, a scholarly periodical which is not entirely impossible to get your hands on outside of university libraries (and costs a modest €12) but is still perhaps a little exotic. I am planning a short trip to Kiltimagh to verify the suspicion that you won’t find the volume on the shelves of its bookshops.

You have to wonder at the Irish Times‘s book reviewing policy. Kiely, sure; McGahern, yes okay, though a little expensive. But a Heaney bibliography? And all three in one issue? The issue also has a review (number 24 in a series called “Second Reading”) by Eileen Battersby of Camus’s The Outsider, which is almost nothing more than a synopsis and drew at least one letter to the editor in protest.