Books Ireland was a part-time job for a team of three for ten years after we started it in 1976, but then my employer went bust and I being in my late fifties and Ireland depressed at the time I was sure I wouldn't get another job. Luckily that coincided with the explosion of computers and DTP, and by dint of firing the editor (that was no fun) and taking on the typesetting and page make-up as well, I could just make it support me.

It's still essentially a one-person operation, but Features Editor Shirley Kelly gives the interviews about a third or quarter of her time working from home (she has a young family) and assistant publisher Tony Canavan is also a part-time homeworker. My ex-tele-sales daughter (also with young children) lines up the advertisers, and we're lucky to have Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú as Gaelic Editor. My main job is the 'First Flush' column in which I try to sum up the month's new books with the sort of comments that a browser in a bookshop might make flicking through them.

When you consider that books are the most important products of humanity -- the seedbeds and carriers of our ideas, imaginings and discoveries from generation to generation -- and that the Irish are the most remarkable writers in the world (a tiny country with four Nobel prizewinners for literature, and a list of the great and famous I'd better not start or I'd never stop), you will appreciate that I happen to have the most important job in the world. Give or take a UN Secretary or US President, of course -- let it never be said I've lost my modesty or sense of proportion!

We love our subscribers in 34 countries, and I feel like Mr Chips every month as I print out the address labels again, a litany of old friends...