A stationer, a circulating library.

One of the small pleasures of restoring an old Dublin house is reading Thom's Street Directory back through the years. Number twenty-three has an unusually complete run of entries, from 1789 onwards.

In 1789 the ground floor was occupied by a Mr McConnochiey, a dealer in mahogany and other hardwoods. By 1841 it had passed to Edward Hall, a builder and timber merchant, and his relative Catherine Hall, a stationer who ran what the directory calls a circulating library out of the shop - a small subscription library, of the sort found across Georgian and early Victorian Dublin.

From then on the tenants change with the century. A haberdasher, a boot and shoe warehouse, a slate merchant, a co-operative building society, a pawnbroker, a coach builder, a newsagent. From 1896 to 1921 the upper floors were let as tenements - eight families in six rooms in the 1911 census. Then a tobacconist and confectioner, James Jeffers, from 1941 to 1951, and - for a decade at the tail end of the seventies - Jeffers' Soccer Shop.

The current use is quieter. But the shopfront on the north bay, the one cut in the 1930s, is still there.