Bookshops editor
Ronan Devlin
Ronan Devlin worked behind the counter of an independent bookshop in Cork for sixteen years before he started writing about the trade.
Beats
Published in Threadcount Review
Across the Alphabet: The Politics of Transliteration
How a translator spells a name in English can carry centuries of imperial history. A close look at three writers whose transliterated names have changed in print across a decade.
The Condolence Letter After the Internet
What happens to the most difficult of all the personal-letter forms when most condolence now happens in a comment thread, a text message, or not at all.
The Personal Canon: On the Books One Keeps
A piece on the small private list of books any serious reader carries, and on the test by which a book enters it.
Behind the Till at Shakespeare and Company
A week working in the rue de la Bûcherie bookshop opposite Notre-Dame, observing the operational realities of a bookshop that has become a literary tourist destination while still functioning as a working bookseller of new and second-hand titles.
Dalkey Archive After John O'Brien: An Imprint Tries to Stay Itself
Dalkey Archive Press, the experimental fiction imprint founded by John O'Brien in 1984, was acquired in 2022 by Deep Vellum. Ronan Devlin reads the post-acquisition list and asks whether the catalogue still recognises itself.
A Corkonian Debut from Tramp Press
Donal Twomey's <em>The Bandon Line</em>, published by Tramp Press on 2026-04-30, is a 244-page first novel set on the closed West Cork railway between 1961 and 1979. It is the kind of book the Irish small-press scene was made for.
Fan Letters to the Dead
A small archive at a Welsh public library holds eighteen hundred letters written to authors who could not read them. The collection is stranger and more honest than it sounds.
The Coracle-Maker's Daughter, from Skein Press
Aine Halloran's debut novel, set on the River Teifi in west Wales between 1971 and 1988, is the first hardback from the Cork-based Skein Press. It is a slower book than its press release suggests.
Two Rivers Press and the Reading Public It Does Not Quite Have
A small Welsh poetry press has published a hundred and thirty-eight books in twenty-two years. Its average print run has fallen by half in that time.
Sort of Books in Edinburgh, Twenty Years On
A small Scottish imprint has published forty-two titles since 2005. Its accountant says the numbers still surprise her.
The Narrow Shop on Fore Street
A morning at Bartram & Sons, a fifty-three-year-old bookshop in the Devon market town of Totnes, where the till still rings with a bell and the back room holds 11,000 second-hand titles arranged by an interior logic only the owner fully understands.