Ask before you drop, says bookshop owner

Mullingar bookshop owner Stella Lynch quite literally had a surprise on her doorstep on Monday morning last, when she arrived at work to find out she was the victim of an unusual case of illegal dumping.

Stella was incensed to find that someone had, overnight, dumped a hefty container-load of books on the steps of Just Books, her bookshop at 23 Pearse Street.

She had to enlist the help of a customer to lift the overflowing container into the store. No note was left identifying who left the box, which contained well-weathered factbooks, children's encyclopaedias, a yearbook and a Microsoft Windows guidebook - not best sellers by any stretch of the imagination.

"I'm raging," she told the Westmeath Examiner. "I don't sell secondhand books, and never have. I have a limited amount of space here.

"The cheek of someone to just dump them here without asking."

Stella said that the simple thing to do would have been to ask if she sold secondhand books. "There are a number of charity shops in town, I would have been happy to point them in the right direction," she said.

But far from dropping them at a charity shop, Stella said, the mystery person decided to dump them at Just Books because of its sheltered front step.