Skip to main content

Reeve & McIntyre Big Up Bookshops 8: Halfway Up The Stairs

Kevin had enjoyed his week at Little Acorns Bookstore in Derry. With a tummy full of traybake and Biscoffs, he said his goodbyes and took off. He flew south over the border and down the coast. As he flapped over Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, and Black Rock he saw the Irish Riviera was basking in blazing sunshine as usual, and the ice cream shops were doing a rare old trade.

But Kevin wasn’t all that interested in ice cream - it was too cold, and not biscuity enough. He wondered what exciting biscuits would be waiting for him at Halfway Up The Stairs in Greystones?



When he landed outside the shop he found that it wasn’t half way up any stairs at all, it was just on a street, like a normal shop. To his surprise, his friend Cardigan Faun was there, along with all his family. “I’m certainly meeting a lot of people from back home in Bumbleford on this International Bookshop Tour,” said Kevin.

“That’s because this picture of a bookshop was painted by Sarah McIntyre, and we’re the people she likes drawing best,” explained Cardigan Faun.

“Who?” said Kevin. “And what do you mean, picture?”
“This is a picture we’re in,” said Cardigan Faun. “It’s a very nice one, too. It was done in watercolour.”

It was all getting a bit meta for Kevin. “You’ll be telling me next I’m just a picture of a flying pony,” he said. “But I am not, I am an actual real live flying pony, and also a roly-poly one, which is the Best Sort. Anyway, I’m mainly here for the biscuits I mean books.”



Luckily, just at that moment, the picture of a door popped open and a picture of Mrs Cardigan Faun came out to welcome him with a nice big plate of biscuits.

“Are those just a picture of biscuits?” asked Kevin, suspiciously.

“No, they’re real enough!” laughed Mrs Cardigan Faun. “And when you’ve eaten them, come inside and meet Trish Hennessy - she’ll answer all your booky questions.”

Kevin: What is the best thing about being a bookseller?

Trish: Getting the right books into the hands of children

Kevin: What’s one way you’ve tackled a problem that your bookshop has faced during the pandemic?

Trish:Teaming up with Sarah Webb, we have hosted monthly Children’s Books Salons, bringing authors & illustrators (including Philip Reeve & Sarah McIntyre!) and children’s books experts together in conversations held on Zoom, to an adult audience of children’s book lovers. We also have brought our personal touch to online transactions by providing a personal recommendation service, and handwriting cards for all postal transactions.

Kevin: What are three books you absolutely love hand-selling to customers?

Trish: Diary of Pig series by Emer Stamp; Boot by Shane Hegarty; Here we Are by Oliver Jeffers (and of course The Roly Poly Flying Pony books, and we love Grumpycorn too!!)



Kevin: Who is your favourite children’s book illustrator? (Other than Reeve & McIntyre…)

Trish: Oliver Jeffers

Kevin: What is your favourite biscuit?

Trish: Plain chocolate digestives. Would you…

Kevin: Ooh! Don’t mind if I do… (TWO HUNDRED PLAIN DIGESTIVES LATER) Do you have a shop pet?

Trish: No. I do have a lab called Simba but he’s a bit nuts so I wouldn’t trust him for a second in the bookshop!

Kevin: What is the best way for people to buy books from you if they can’t visit the shop in person?

www.halfwayupthestairs.ie


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...
5 comments
Read more

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

One of the reasons the Arthurian Legends appeal so much to writers and film makers is that there is no single original version. If there ever was, it was a tale told by some Romano-British storyteller, sitting by a fire in a damp hall, perhaps expounding on the great deeds of a local ruler or late Roman general, and spicing up the action with some motifs borrowed from old Celtic myths. In the centuries that followed, the story grew, and changed. Lots of legends about other heroes got tacked on to it. French and German poets got hold of it and added Camelot, the Grail, and Courtly Love: Malory borrowed from them all in his Morte D’Arthur . Later, everyone from Tennyson to TH White to Rick Wakeman to little me retold the stories, altering them to fit our own vision and reflect our own times. So you can do whatever you like with King Arthur: everyone else has. At least, that’s the theory. Now here's Guy Ritchie’s 2017 box office catastrophe King Arthur, Legend of the Sword to destru...
1 comment
Read more