Published: Wednesday, 4th August, 2010 5:00pm
Moneytimes with Jill Kerby
Where is the book town of Ireland?
Jill Kerby.
Pic by==: 97
In the last fortnight a great literary honour was bestowed on Dublin when it was named as the fourth UNESCO City of Literature, along with Edinburgh, Melbourne and Iowa City, (whose university has produced 25 Pulitzer Prize Winners since 1955).
If you live in Dublin like I do, but even if you are just a casual visitor, it's hard to miss its literary heritage. The city is full of monuments and statues, plaques, pubs and restaurants that celebrate the spirit and works of its literary figures, from Dean Swift, Sheridan, Boucicault and Synge to Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey, Beckett, Behan, and O'Brien. The city's living writers are just as much a fabric of the modern Dublin and include Booker Prize winners Roddy Doyle, and Anne Enright, as well as the internationally acclaimed Colm Toibin, Eavan Boland, Maeve Binchy and Joseph O'Connor.
The city's new status will help boost the flagging tourist industry. Literary tours are common; there are regular book launches and readings; the bookshops are busy and mostly profitable. Restaurants even cash in on the most famous authors - check out the excellent Chapter One at the top of Parnell Square the next time you're in town. Next door is the Dublin Writers Museum.
Good for Dublin. Yet the UNESCO award reminded me that another fantastic geo-literary project still goes unclaimed, despite my (albeit puny) efforts to publicise it.
Where is the Book Town of Ireland?
UNESCO's City of Literature concept is relatively new, but the older Book Towns movement will celebrate 50 years next year, having started in 1961 in Hay-on-Wye on the border between England and Wales and now the host of leading international literary and arts festivals.
There are now about 20 such towns around the world, including Redu in Belgium; Becherel and Montolieu in northern and southern France; Fjaerland, Norway; Muehlbeck/Friedersdorf in Germany; Stillwater, Minnesota; Sidney-by-the-Sea in Canada and Kampung Boku Langkawi in Malaysia. There are two competing Book Towns in Scotland, Dalmellington and Wigton and one in England in Sedburgh, Cumbria.
None of these places, except perhaps Hay-on-Wye, are well known, except perhaps to book lovers and Book Town pilgrims, who mostly fall into the higher spending category of tourists.
I only discovered the wonderful Sedbergh because I spent three days there in the wet summer of 2008 with my son and husband who were hiking Hadrian's Wall. We had no idea when we decided to use Sedbergh as our base for the second part of our week in the Lake District and Cumbria that the picturesque little town held a dozen or so specialist bookshops. (Had I known, we wouldn't have flown with Ryanair, but would have taken the car ferry: I ended up spending €300 on books and another €100 on postage.)
Sedbergh's librarian told me that the village was slowly dying before it became The Book Town of England. Its only claim to fame (aside from being near Hadrian's Wall) is an old and distinguished public school founded in the early 16th century, which generated some business, but not enough to keep all the shops and services open, especially not when the big shopping malls in bigger nearby towns had sucked so much of its commercial life away.
An old weaving town, Sedbergh is set in gorgeous hilly landscape, but with an ageing rural community and an increasing number of empty shop fronts, something had to be done. They set up a feasibility committee. The only vaguely literary connection they had was the ancient public school and the more distant connection to two popular literary figures of the Lake District, Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth, so they relied on the hill walking attractions of the Cumbrian countryside and the great Roman Wall to draw in visitors to the burgeoning Book Town (one bookshop has a huge array of trekking books and maps).
It is "a work in progress", the librarian told me. "Enthusiasm goes up and down among the locals, but it is working and has brought new life and money to the village."
Unlike Sedbergh and all the other book towns, the Irish Book Town would have something utterly unique on its doorstep from the start: Ireland's great literary tradition.
A small town or large village, (say, ideally, somewhere in the midlands, but it could be anywhere that has access to a good quick highway to everywhere else) would not just sell books from its general and specialist, new and antiquarian bookshops, but offer also offer a myriad of literary events - readings and seminars and festivals throughout the year. (I'd even go to the festival of Christmas books).
Book Towns also create their own service industries of cafes, restaurants and gift shops. Visitors to the Book Town stay in it because they are accommodated in B&Bs, guesthouses and even the Big House that may already be a noted Blue Book or Hidden Ireland country house hotel.
But to really make a success of being the Book Town of Ireland, someone would set up the Book Town tour company that organises day trips (or even overnight stays) to all the literary places of interest around the country but ensures that everyone comes back to the Book Town at the end of the day.
I can see it now: Book Town of Ireland mini-buses and coaches taking visitors to Dublin for the day (or two) then to Yeats Country in Sligo and to Lady Gregory's Galway. Fans of the Irish big house genre would visit the Cork of Somerville and Ross and Elizabeth Bowen; poetry lovers could travel to the birthplaces of some of the finest modern English language poets, to Meath (Francis Ledwidge), Monaghan (Paddy Kavanagh), Belfast (Louis MacNeice, Thomas Carnduff, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon) and Donegal/Derry (Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane.)
This is a concept that could be sold to our nearest bookish neighbours in Britain and Europe, to the Irish diaspora, to lovers of Irish literature from Argentina to Japan. There must be plenty of wealthy, bookish, literary types in India and China, combined population two billion, who could be persuaded to come experience the greatest literary experience of their lives based in the Book Town of Ireland.
Is there a Book Town of Ireland out there? A small place, in a beautiful part of your county that needs a new beginning?
Are the people of that town willing to provide some of the start-up finance and organisational expertise? Are they willing to take ownership of the project from start to finish?
If there is such a place, do let me know. I'd love to be part of it.
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