Dublin Writers Museum

This guide to the Dublin Writers Museum starts at a locked Georgian doorway, behind which sit Samuel Beckett's own telephone, a first edition of Dracula, and Jonathan Swift's coffee pot. It traces the red brick house built for the Jameson whiskey family, its ceilings plastered by stuccodore Michael Stapleton, and the 1991 opening that turned it into a museum built around the private lives of Ireland's writers. Visitors once climbed the stairs under that same Stapleton ceiling, past Brendan Behan's old trade union card.