An Irish Indie St. Patrick's Day

Next Wednesday, I'll not be wearing the green. My heritage is a bit too mongrelized--equal thirds English, Irish and Scottish. Still, I've read the requisite Irish literature and more than a few nonrequisite titles. I've eaten my share of soda bread, and even downed a few pints of green beer against my better judgment.

So what's a not-Irish-enough bookseller-turned-editor do for St. Patrick's Day when he can no longer build Irish-themed book displays? What I found myself doing this week was reading the Irish Times, beginning with an article Monday about the "doomsday book scenario" booksellers there currently face.

"When the news that Hughes & Hughes was going into receivership broke, the sense of dismay among book people was palpable," Conor Pope wrote. "Countless other businesses have gone under during the course of this recession but the closure of a bookshop appeared to elicit an emotional response which was lacking when other retailers shut up shop."

Alan Hayes, president of Publishing Ireland, observed, "Books are in our blood, and this closure will, I fear, have a knock-on effect on our whole industry" and noted that "fewer Irish-owned bookshops will mean less shelf space for locally produced books which may see indigenous publishers driven out of business."

Okay, maybe this is not turning out to be a Happy St. Patrick's Day column, but it will have its moments, I promise. Beginning now:

A little sun broke through the clouds when Pope suggested, "Given this tough environment, only a brave man or a fool would be willing to enter the book trade. Step up to the plate, then, Bob Johnston. A former Hughes & Hughes buyer, Johnston opened his Gutter Bookshop in Dublin's Temple Bar last November and he is the first to admit it was a 'mad and crazy' move."

And author Charlie Connelly added, "It is always sad to see bookshops go and always sad to see them taken over by bigger chains. It is very easy to buy stuff on Amazon--you just push a button and it arrives at your door--but I think that people who hold the independent bookshops dear are going to have to come up with the readies. The reading public are going to have to do more if they want independent bookshops to survive. I wonder how many of these people who expressed sadness about Hughes & Hughes closing have actually spent any money there in recent years?"

He also suggested that writers "are going to have to start supporting our local bookshops by doing more events and holding more readings. Depending on book reviews and promotions to sell books is not going to be enough."

Last Saturday in the Irish Times, Shane Hegarty asked the unsettling question: "Is closing a bookshop akin to knocking down a unicorn?" Acknowledging that times are tough all over, Hegarty wrote, "Why should Ireland be so special that it can afford several book chains when the U.K. now has only one? Is it enough that we still buy a lot of books (15 million last year) and that we consider ourselves to be pretty decent at writing them too?... But the unthinkable is already happening--in how books are bought, published and read. Ten years ago, few would have guessed how much music would soon be bought without there being a physical purchase involved. But people still love music. Ten years from now, the books trade will have changed, perhaps as radically. But it will not be the end of reading. That is the only truly unimaginable thing."

All, however, is never--or seldom--lost. In an Irish Times interview, Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies, talked about the book trade from a writer's perspective: "Jay-Z was talking about music downloading, and is music downloading killing the industry, and he said one effect of the music downloading boom is that only people who are really, really committed to music will actually stay in it. People who aren't in it to make money will be the folks who stick it out and find some way to make it work. So maybe it's not entirely a bad thing that there's so little money in writing because it means that the folks who do it are the folks who are committed to it."

Sounds like a lot of booksellers I know. Happy Indie St. Patrick's Day--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1136.