What we’ve been up to at Blarney Books…
Well, we do seem to be becoming a rather busy little bookshop these days, and some of it isn’t even about books! Our art side of the shop seems to have been taking up a lot of our time lately, but in the weeks ahead we do have a few more literary events on. We still have our 2010 Biblio-Art Exhibition running (it finishes up on the 6th of September), and it is all on-line for people to browse as well. We have also put up short video clips of the opening night, and interviews with the winning artists(see below). All great fun indeed! The exhibition has been very popular and we’ve had a fair amount of media coverage too. Which means that more people have been through our shop this winter than in the previous five winters we’ve been open.
Tomorrow, we are putting on a play – a theatre group actually approached us to put it on in the space we have, because they loved the atmosphere of the shop. That’s wonderful to hear! I haven’t personally seen this play before, although it has been touring around for some time, and getting high praise in reviews. It’s a one-hour four-person play based around the life of Sylvia Plath, so very literary indeed. Of course, I have a table of Plath-related books set up, we have 45 booked so far to come and see it, and we are putting on a light afternoon tea afterwards. All for $20 a head. Hopefully it will be just the ticket for a cold wet Port Fairy Sunday afternoon!
The following weekend we have a local author, Paul Burman, launching his second novel (being published in the UK) “The Grease Monkey’s Tale”. His previous novel, “The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore” received wonderful reviews, so we are looking forward to this one! For the launch, we put on wine & nibbles, signed books are of course available, and we have another author of some repute, Dmetri Kakmi, doing the introductions! We hope for strong attendance and support – it’s not every day we can launch a local author!