April 10th, 2005
Does Dublin need a pub bookshop?
I know I’m using chronic busyness as an excuse for not posting this week (well, that and a clunky old mac I had to work on this week, which would wheeze and collapse if I had more than two browsers and Word open). For another reason, it was a bad week to be working full-time because I didn’t get to check out the Winding Stair Bookshop and Cafe. It closed its doors for good yesterday, which is a real shame.
When I first started to hit town on a Saturday afternoon in search of records, books and mad coloured hair dye, I used to pop in there. Many a Saturday was spent poring over records I�d just bought and gazing out over the Liffey. Having spent all my cash on music, The Winding Stair offered one of the cheapist cups of tea in Dublin.
The books were kind of expensive but then I honestly don’t recall ever buying one there (I was given a first edition of The Moment by Virginia Woolf for my birthday last year, by two friends who scoured its shelves).
The owner was on Morning Ireland during the week and said that it would be replaced by another bookshop, but it’s unlikely to be one that serves food and encourages people to sit and soak up a book over a cuppa.
As the old coffee shops decline (Bewley’s went a few months back) , a new generation of plastic-clad chains will no doubt triumph, offering pre-packed soggy sandwiches and arid muffins suffocating in shrink wrap. Stand up Starbucks…
So I had an idea. If old school coffee shops and ones of a literary persuasion can’t survive, what about a pub meets bookshop? People will always go boozing, Davy Byrne’s manages to milk its Ulysses connection year round and there’s the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. So why not have a pub you can read books in? Even better - to save people knocking pints over the stock, why not make it a pub library? It might even encourage lots of non-readers to take up reading over a swift pint. There’s nothing like quaffing a pint in cosy snug with a good book.
If a pub and a bookshop seem like a weird marriage, I’ve been in a great bar-cum-launderette in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone’s. You can sit on a dryer at the back, sipping a beer, watching a band and getting your clothes washed all at once. If you bring your washing, you even get in free to gigs.
Pub-meets-bookshop is better though and I think it’s a winner - what do you reckon?