The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Tom Muckian & Roe River Books: The shortest river stands against the Amazon tide
In this episode, I chat with Tom Muckian about Roe River Books, a thriving independent bookshop in Dundalk, Ireland.
The name itself carries a powerful story of resistance. Tom deliberately named his shop after the world's shortest river as a symbolic counterpoint to Amazon, the world's longest. "I want to be the polar opposite of what Amazon represents," he explains. "I want to be about people and community and recommending books, not algorithms."
Most compelling is Tom's perspective on what makes a great bookseller—understanding that it's not about individual expertise but creating a collective team that connects with readers. "Maybe you don't become a great bookseller individually, but as a collective in a bookshop, as a team, you can become a great bookselling team."
Whether you're passionate about books, interested in Irish culture, or curious about the future of independent retail, Tom's story reminds us why physical bookshops remain vital cultural touchstones in our increasingly digital world. Subscribe now to hear more conversations with remarkable booksellers from around the globe.
Not Your China Doll, Katie Gee Salisbury
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to Episode 289. In this episode, I'm speaking with Tom Markian, owner of Row River Books, an independent bookshop located in the country town of Dundalk in County Louth, Ireland. The bookstore was traditionally associated with the sale of school textbooks. However, since 2015, they stock a full range of books and pride themselves on being able to source just about any title customers require. Hi, Tom, and welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for inviting us on, mandy. I'm thrilled to be invited on. This is my first podcast appearance, so it's the first for me and I'm curious. I know it's your show when you ask the questions, but how did you come across us from the far side of the pond?
Speaker 1:Well, I do a lot of research, I'm constantly looking for bookshops globally and I happen to love Ireland. I have a son and his wife who live there and I love Irish authors. But let's learn about you and your work as a civil engineer and your career twisting in and out of book selling.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think I'm probably a textbook example of what I've noticed from even listening to some of your earlier podcasts, where I suppose some of them ended up being bookshop owners but hadn't started out in the trade I was listening to was itally from the dulwich bookshop who came from publishing side of the industry, and then I think it was the book barn in in australia where the guy had been in the armed forces and then ended up working in the family business that he married into and I think that speaks to the. The root of what most booksellers are is that it's vocational and I would say I was always maybe not to be too hard on myself more civil than more of an engineer. When I was in civil engineering I enjoyed what I did to a certain degree, but I always enjoyed the interaction with people, with builders, with looking at a project coming together, rather than the hard maths that goes with an engineering project. That's not really where I'm at my most comfortable. So I'd started in civil engineering.
Speaker 2:I was there for five or six years I suppose, and then the economy here, well before the Celtic Tiger came prowling around, went into a very steep nosedive. I think the unemployment figures in Dundalk at the time were around about 30% or something like that, and I was laid off and I had the choice at that stage, which a lot of people of my age had, that they either hopped on a boat and went to the UK or to America or Australia or I needed to look around to do something else and naively, with no experience of retail whatever, I thought that the fact that I liked books would be enough if I could scramble enough money together to open a shop. So I found a unit, a small unit, um, about eight, nine hundred square feet, and I I stocked it by spreading the books very far apart so that it didn't look like I didn't have that much stock and, in fairness, I suppose I lasted about three or four years. There was a three-year nine-month lease that I took out and then, at the end of the three-year nine-month lease, there were a few things that were happening. One the economy was starting to pick up slightly, which was good, and there was a job available in my old engineering firm where I'd worked previously, and the second one was that there was a thing at the time called the net book agreement, which was sort of a gentleman's agreement in the uk and ireland, which meant that I suppose, to put it in american terms that you'd understand if an independent book shop had a book on sale at ten dollars, walmart would have it exactly the same, barnes and nobles would have it at exactly the same. So you were never at a price point disadvantage with your bigger competitors. And then that was done away with.
Speaker 2:So I could see down the line that supermarkets were going to start selling, and this is in the days before amazon. So it wasn't that you were worried about ebooks or about online selling. This was simply some of our local supermarket chains. We want to start selling books and discounting them down heavily, and the the margins were just too tight and I was always struggling to get the traction together to be able to make a real go of it. So when the lease was up and my landlord turned up and said, listen, we need you to sign on for another three years and I had the offer on the table to go back to civil engineering, I thought it would be nice to go back to a point where I could be sick and not worry about who I would get in to replace me.
Speaker 2:I could take holidays, I could have Sundays off and things like that, because when you own and run a bookshop, you may not always be in the shop, but you're constantly on call. Your laptop goes on holidays with you, you're always researching new authors, you're reading um, which is a pleasant uh, diversion, but it is all part of what you do as your as your work. So yeah, I think I did that and then spent 20 years in civil engineering and the old celtic tiger thing was was really really busy. That kept going right up until the early 2000s and at some point, possibly around about the introduction of the mobile phone, I noticed that when you went home in the evening, work didn't stop. Your email came with you. If you engaged with it, your mobile phone would ring and it would be somebody who probably knew you well enough to think it's okay to ring Tom because I get on well with him. But they would never have thought of ringing you on your home phone if it was a landline. But the mobile phone somehow elasticated your working hours and your availability for them. So I just began to get a bit disillusioned with the constant I suppose relentlessness of it.
Speaker 2:It really was quite hectic over here for a while and my wife's sister lived in jordan, in amman at the time, and we went to visit her one summer and we spent three weeks over there and it was such a culture shock, you know, waking up hearing the call to prayer, the, the heat, the, the food, the, just the, almost the feel in the air around me that it was like a, a cultural reset for me and I just thought I really don't want to not that I wanted to stay there, necessarily. It was beautiful and I went to, we saw Petra and did the um, the, the Peter O'Toole thing, down in Jerash and stayed in the Wadi Rum and it was beautiful. But when I got back it took a while to settle and I just made up my mind. I was leaving the company I was working for. I had no bigger ambition than that and one or two of the people that I used to work for said well, look, we'd like you to keep representing us, if you wouldn't mind. So I said fine, and then, I think, within about a year, one of them bought a building and in that building was an educational bookshop and it was a bit incongruous because he wasn't a big reader, this guy, and I said, why are you buying it?
Speaker 2:And he said, well, I only want the building, but the guy who owns it is getting out of the business, so the business comes with it, if you like. So I said, well, if you're ever doing anything with it or if you're selling it on, let me know. So I found myself about two hours later, over a cup of coffee, having bought a bookshop, not really knowing what I was doing. But it was a different setup. It was an academic bookshop, because in Ireland I don't know what it's like in the States, but at that time parents bought the books for their children for school, so it had a backbone, which was a terrific thing to have. At the time. You knew that over a given year you would sell X amount of books and I thought this is really simple. I'll just do that and then I'll take in general books as well. It'll go gangbusters, but it didn't quite work out that way immediately.
Speaker 1:And was that Carol's Educational Supplies?
Speaker 2:Yes, that was that. Yeah, and they were a publisher at the time. They did publish a small range of books, but the guy who owned the company was getting on in years and I think he wanted to get out of the business. So, yeah, we dealt with a lot of schools, um, and that's a different thing entirely to selling general books. It's it's you're selling to people primarily. You don't necessarily want to have to buy them, so it's not an elective thing.
Speaker 2:The atmosphere in the shop is a little bit more business-like than it would be in a nice, comfortable, independent bookshop, and the general feeling I've always had in the intervening period is that because we were so heavily associated with school books that people sometimes resented coming to us for their pleasurable book buying, if I could put it like that they didn't think of us. We were so firmly entrenched in their minds as an academic bookshop. They wouldn't think of coming to us for books at Christmas or birthdays or whatever bookshop. They wouldn't think of coming to us for books at Christmas or birthdays or whatever. So it took a while to, I suppose, get over that hurdle with them. But we did eventually and we opened the shop in 2007 under our own stewardship, if you like. And we're still there. I can't do the maths. That's how bad I was at engineering almost 20 years, then 18 almost and is that when the store became known as row river books no, we changed the name.
Speaker 2:Initially I didn't want to change the name because I thought because there's an academic bookshop, it had quite a large catchment area. A lot of um people from rural areas, maybe 20, 30, 40 miles away, would come to talk for them and they would come once a year. And I thought if I changed the name and we had moved location by this stage we moved location within six months of opening I thought they won't be able to find us and they'll come to Dundalk one day. They won't find us and then they'll just go somewhere else or they'll get them at the school or they'll make other arrangements. So I thought we'll stick with the name for a while and then we'll change it. And then it just got kicked down the road for a while. So we eventually changed the name in 2018.
Speaker 2:Part of the reason I suppose it took so long to change was just trying to think of a name. You know I went through lots of stuff in my head and a few that I really liked. It turned out that someone else had already nabbed them. So you know you were trying to come up with something original, something that was representative. I could have just put my own name on it.
Speaker 1:And can you share the story behind the name Row River Books?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I suppose to jump back a bit when I closed the bookshop originally in the 90s, the first bookshop that I opened, for that I had for four or five years. Amazon were only really starting at that stage and I had an account with them and would never bought from them, obviously, when I had a bookshop. But then when we closed the shop, I sort of it wasn't that I stayed away from bookshops, but I was a little bit sad when I went into a bookshop and I felt, you know that sense of failure that you hadn't been able to keep it going. So I kind of stayed away from bookshops for a while and Amazon were an easy option and at the time, if I remember rightly, game of Thrones was just maybe starting around about then and my mother who's was a voracious reader and that's where I got my love of books from was started reading the very first book in the series. So I would buy the books for her and I had ordered I think it was I think the fourth book in the series when it came out in hardback and she died after an illness in 2004. But I'd ordered the book before because of the pre-ordering option in 2003 and it arrived about six months after she died and I'd never started reading it, because I've a rule I won't start reading a series of books unless they're all available and obviously George R Martin is still struggling with that side of things, so they're not finished, so I might never get around to reading them, but I've got the TV show.
Speaker 2:But I just thought that there was something mercenary about the fact that here was this book that I had ordered and obviously they'd had my card details and and I I came across it recently because I still have the amazon slip in the book. I just looked at it earlier today and it was ordered in 2003 and delivered in 2005. I think it was feast of crows and I just thought there was something mercenary about that. That they had taken the payment from me, they'd had my details on card and they had sent the book out to me and it just just for some odd reason probably because it was my mother and because of the fact that she'd only recently passed it just struck me as slightly mercenary. And I think I took a slight dislike to Amazon at that point and at that stage they weren't as heavily discounting books as they subsequently did. I think the book was $18.99 sterling and I think it cost me $16.99. So it wasn't the half price new bestseller thing that they're doing now. And I just thought you know what, if I was still selling books, this would be horrific to be dealing with this.
Speaker 2:And after that I sort of made a conscious effort not to deal with them. And the more you learn about the guy who runs the company and what he does and how big his carbon footprint is and all that and I know he's a businessman and it's not a personal attack on him but that sort of big corporate cultural thing always seemed to me to be the antithesis of what an independent bookshop should be. And I think that was proved when their own bricks and mortar stores didn't work. You know that they weren't able to replicate what an independent bookshop does and what some of the bigger bookstores in fairness can manage to do.
Speaker 2:So I was looking for something that would identify us or separate us out from Amazon. And I thought well, the Amazon is the longest river in the world and what's the shortest river in the world? And at the time it was the Row River, which is in Great Falls, missouri Still is, although I think the designation in the Guinness Book of Records has been removed now, so there is no shortest river in the world anymore. But it was 200 feet long, I think it was at the time and I thought, well, I want to be the polar opposite of what Amazon represent and what they are. I want to be about people and community and recommending books, not algorithms, and I wanted to encompass that. So I thought there was a nice flow and a bit of alliteration to calling it Row River Books. So I did that and it seems to hit well with most people when I say it to them. They don't like the fact that it's, you know, sort of putting two fingers up to the big guy.
Speaker 1:And I would say that a large majority of society doesn't actually understand how Amazon hurts authors and the publishing industry in general. And, of course, it hurts independent bookshops, and I think, with that in mind, the best thing that we can do is to explain how book selling works to people when we get a chance and how, when they buy from their local independent bookshop, they're supporting their own community. They are putting tax dollars back into their community. The people in their community are working at the bookshop, but, my gosh, it's so much easier for most people just to press that button on Amazon and get their book delivered at three o'clock the next morning. I think in some ways, we've become slaves to instant gratification. Yeah, I think it's important too.
Speaker 2:They do serve a function and I do think that there are some authors that I've dealt with. There's an author I have a sort of an email correspondence with called Adam Neville, who writes horror. He's an English writer and I spoke to him some time ago at a convention in Dublin and he said that part of his problem is that he was a horror author at a time when horror books weren't in vogue and he was with Pan Macmillan, who didn't really he felt value what he was doing. He was in a four or five book deal with them and I mean he's a very good writer anyway.
Speaker 2:I always think writing should define an author rather than the genre they write in, which is something I feel quite strongly about. Some of the best writing I've come across has been in genre fiction, but it tends to get pushed to the side a little bit too much. But he, about 10 years ago, started his own imprint and he sells a lot of his books by solicitation now on his own website. He uses Amazon on his own website to sell the books. But he said if he sells a book now, he gets a much bigger percentage of it than he would do if it was with a mainstream publisher. So I think Amazon in some ways are, I think, enabled by publishers in a way that sometimes helps authors, but they can't offer as big and as advanced as some of the big five, or even imprints, and, let's remember, amazon isn't in that many countries.
Speaker 1:So when authors, if they're self-publishing, I recommend considering going what we call wide, which is having your eBooks available on many, many platforms, rather than checking that little box as you're uploading your e-book to Amazon, which is a 90-day contract, I think, which means you cannot have your e-book for sale on any other e-book platform for that 90 days. You must only have your e-book with Amazon. But apart from all this, yes, it can work for a lot of authors and it has worked for many, but it's also worked for many authors who self-publish, who go wide. One thing I would like to bring up with you I was reading an article in the Irish Independent from December 2023, and it was titled New Home for Independent Louth Bookshop in Dundalk Town Centre, and I began thinking about the changes in pedestrian traffic in certain areas. And when this happens, do you feel it is brought on by rental prices and businesses relocating to buildings off the high streets, or do you think change is linked to generational behaviour, or both?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think depending on where you open your shop, you will have a different experience. Dundalk is a relatively small town. It's about 40,000 population and we've had to sort of almost create the need for an independent bookshop in this town. And I think that's something a lot of towns would identify with, because visibility in terms of reading is hugely important. If you see a bookshop, if you're surrounded by books surrounded by books, you're, you know it almost becomes an addictive thing. You know people who haven't read in a while suddenly pick up a book again. And if you're, if you live in a town in the Romanian Ireland unfortunately, that don't have the bookshop or an independent bookshop, they will still buy books, they will still, you know, use Amazon, they will pick it up in the local supermarket or whatever. But the experience that I associate with going to an independent bookshop is missing, and I think part of the problem is that because book selling is vocational rather than a money driven vocation for a lot of people, I think you're immediately behind the eight ball because rents are high, commercial rates are high, footfall on main streets is down. If you live in a town where there's a shopping center and you have very seasonal changes in weather as we have, and it's bitterly cold outside and it's lashing with rain, the option of going onto the main street or walking into a nice, comfortable, air-conditioned, warm. Um, I mean we have a shopping center in dundalk which is effectively a main shopping street, but it's got a roof over it, it's got air conditioning. You know there's no anti-social behavior. It's got nice shops to wander up and down. You can have a coffee, you can. You know you could spend a day there. Now I can't compete with that if it's teeming with rain and if it's cold and miserable and wet and damp and you can't get parked anywhere near my front door. So I think those sort of issues have, I suppose I won't say attacked, but they've certainly undermined high street retail in a way that is not helpful. And I don't think local authorities, who set commercial rates and who in effect are the landlords of that public high street and have a responsibility to keep it attractive and keep it nice, sometimes don't follow through in the way that they should. They take the commercial rates, but they'll always have a little caveat on the bottom of the bill saying money collected in your area does not mean it will be spent in your area it could be spent filling potholes 10 miles away. So I think there is that.
Speaker 2:The generational thing is interesting, I think, from a book selling point of view. I've often and it's funny we're at it, 20 years now and more if you include my previous five years. I have friends now who would be, maybe you know, 10, 15, 20 years young with me that I regularly meet up with and talk about books and I remember them as into the shop, you know getting the famous five and rolled out and stuff like that, and you would know their parents. And now I know them as adults and I know their children and I think there's always a period between, I suppose, the end of high school, as you would call it, and maybe college. You know finding women, men, whatever particular variation of that sort of thing you want to get engaged with buying a house, getting a job, getting promotions, putting in the hard yards and reading unless you're an addictive, voracious reader takes a backseat a little bit and then you get them back again when they have their own kids. So I think the demographics in most bookshops and I think this would be fairly universal is either young up to the age of about you know, reading Harry Potter and Scorch Trials and that sort of thing, and then you get them back again when they're reading the hard-bitten alcoholic detective who's hunting down his wife's killer or whatever it might be, and you lose them for about 10 or 15 years in the middle because they've got other demands on the money and other distractions. So I'm not sure generationally it's as damaging as it might be, because I think people who read will always read and you might lose them, but they will come back.
Speaker 2:I think the bigger problem is that there are generations of people being brought up now and my first experience of money was pocket money when I was a kid and it was going to the shop buying sweets, comics, books, whatever. The first experience a lot of kids growing up have now is being handed mom or dad's credit card, so their spending habits are being developed in front of a keyboard, online browsing, and, of course, the range I mean the biggest shopping center you will get in the world is sits on your lap and and they can buy from china, they can buy from south america, they can buy, you know, five miles down the road, or they can buy from the uk, whatever. So I think that might eventually come through. I mean, I know a lot of kids who maybe are at school and you would see them coming through the door and I'm not saying they're socially dysfunctional, but they're different from school kids when I was in school. You know they come in and it's like this, and they don't ask you what, what school book? They show you the cover on the phone, um, and then I always try and engage them in conversation and say, oh, did you read the previous book or what did you think of it? And there's almost a little bit of a double take. And then they'll engage with you and it's you know, and that's what I love about bookshops is, and if I get somebody who's really distracted or on the phone, I love saying completely odd, weird left field things to them, just to get them to, you know, snap out of it and pay attention, because I love that idea of bookshops being, you know, a part of the community. But I don't think.
Speaker 2:I think I remember years ago, before we opened the bookshop, there was a report commissioned by the booksellers association of great britain and ireland which forensically broke down the number of people who read in a given community obviously uk and ireland only. I don't know about america. At that stage and this was back in the late 80s, the the percentage of people in any given population who read regularly was about 19 percent and that was broken down between libraries, people who would borrow books, get them second hand, whatever. Now, that was before ebooks, that was before amazon, that was before the distractions of the mobile phone, before um, adhd, and and an inability of people to read or to want to engage with a, an image or a page that doesn't flick by waving a finger across it. So I would say that figure is probably lower now in some ways, but the good thing about it is it's a hard core percentage and I think they will always read because I think they're hardwired that way.
Speaker 2:Um, but in retail terms, if those people aren't on the street, that's where the problem starts and I think you know I still get people 20 years down the line in the town of 40 000 people saying, oh, I didn't know you were here and it's like, really, because they don't go out, they don't go to 10 centers. You know, um, you know they, they work, they, they get a takeaway on a friday, they put on netflix and you know they never go into town, they get their groceries delivered or they go to a shopping center or they go to a retail park and the main street's just something they drive through maybe. So I think yeah, I think it's a combination. It is yeah, and I think every town you would find probably has a slightly different um, I think the dock has always been a town that's maybe slightly too big to have a small village feel, but a bit, but not big enough to have a kind of a big city vibe either.
Speaker 2:I mean, I listened to your chat with, again, dulwich Books and they talked about there being five or six independent bookshops within a radius. I mean, if five or six other bookshops opened in a radius, in that radius of me, I'd be, I'd be out of business tomorrow and so would they, because I think there is a sort of a self-sustaining sort of community that comes with, um, you know, that sort of village type vibe that you get in a small town or and Hay-on-Wye would be an example of that or the bigger towns which would have the population mass and more people traveling through it. Um, but yeah, I think you, we're still here and I'm not going anywhere.
Speaker 1:And while we're talking about Dundalk, if I had a few days to spare in Dundalk, are there any historic sites, hikes, castles, museums do you suggest I visit? And, because I'm all about chocolate and coffee and books and animals, where would you suggest I go for a fabulous afternoon tea?
Speaker 2:where would you suggest I'd go for a fabulous afternoon tea? Okay, from a pure tourist point of view, I think the dock is, and has been for a lot of its history, uh, an industrial town. I mean, it's coming back slightly now. We've got a couple of um, we've got xerox and paypal and ebay and stuff like that here, um, but for a long time, from the, you know, the late 90s maybe until maybe even earlier, maybe even the mid 80s, until about the early 2000s, dundalk was quite badly affected economically. We're a border town. So you know, you go 15 miles, you go five miles down the road and you're in Northern Ireland, which is jurisdictionally a different country, effectively. And you have Newry, which a a northern Irish town, under UK governance, if you like, and it has a population similar to ours. And then, down the road from us, we have Drogheda, which is another population center of about 30 to 40,000. So we, we really struggled. We were neither one thing or the other, and the troubles of course, which, um, you know, scarred the country for a long time, meant that people were a bit wary of the border because of all the connotations of violence and and whatever. So a lot of it sort of went over my head when I was growing up because you were used to it. It was just. You know that's the way it was. So as a result, it got quite run down. I would say it's it's a turn on the up. I would now and it's got a couple of wonderful things If somebody was coming. I was involved with a bids company. I think you have them in the States as well. I think New York City was one of the first bid companies. It's a business incentive district system and it's about taking an element of the commercial rates and giving it to an independent company who will spend that money to create a nicer environment in the town. And we've implemented since I left, so I can't take credit for it.
Speaker 2:I was on the board for a while a series of murals depicting the history of Dundalk on the side of buildings that had previously not been painted or cared for in a long time. So you can walk around Dundalk and almost get a snapshot of Dundalk's history by doing this walking tour, which happens at weekends a few times a day. It doesn't take too long, but you get to see Oliver Plunkett where he was held in prison. You get to see a couple of beautiful murals of Cú Chulainn, who was a mythical figure, who was from this area. You get to see people like Peter Rice, who was a locally engineer, who worked on the Pompidou and worked on the Louvre and worked on the Sydney Opera House and things like that. So you get a kind of a potted history. And the guy who does it, Liam Gaynor, is terrific because he has the anecdotal stories to go with it. And all of these murals are done by international artists who are invited over and they're here for the two weeks and even putting the murals on is almost like a tourist attraction in itself. You watch them on the cherry picker and they're up on these buildings where I'd get vertigo. You know You've got a fabulous and they do food during the day as well a fabulous.
Speaker 2:I live on Castle Road, which is one of the older towns, the older streets in town, and on the street parallel to us there's a pub called the Spirit Store store, which is a great local gig venue that does food and is a an old-fashioned pub, but it looks right out onto the, the castletown river, which you know at almost at the mouth of the river and you can see the moor mountains where you would be spending your weekend hiking across the moors, so you can start in the south and you can walk across the top of the mountain and effectively you're into another, another country then.
Speaker 2:Um, but it's a beautiful part of the world and I often think, because of the troubles and because I think a lot of people who land in dublin sort of land and go south, they go left, they go down to cork, carry the sunny southeast, they go across to the west of to the Wild Atlantic Way, and the north of Ireland is absolutely stunning. You know, game of Thrones was filmed there so you've probably seen parts of that, albeit CGI'd up a bit. We've got Carlingford Village, which is about a 15-minute drive out the road, which is a medieval village which has remained substantially untouched in recent years. The outskirts of it have become quite clogged up. Now at this stage there's not a huge amount to see.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the road that I live on is a tower which was built as part of a Franciscan friary in 1270. There's only one tower of it left now at this stage, but it's still there and it's, you know, 100 feet high, or whatever it is. It was destroyed in the 1300s by Robert the Bruce, who you might know from Braveheart and films like that. He sacked the friary and I think he murdered 20 or 30 friars who were living there at the time, and then he was crowned King of Ireland in a pub which is just up the road from where I am, so it's a part of the country that's steeped in history.
Speaker 1:One of the things I love about Ireland is the Irish mythology, so is there anywhere in Dundalk that I can go to learn a little bit more about this?
Speaker 2:We do a thing again. I haven't been involved in her in recent years, but um, the anton, as it's called, is is the great irish myth, if you like. It would be our equivalent of the king arthur legend, if you like. And cuhollin, um, when you read it, thomas kinsler wrote, I think, the best english translation of it um, it's, it's mythology, but it's based very much in the geography of the country. And there's another lady I'll pass her details on to you by email who lives in Arizona at the moment, but she writes a magazine called Reading Ireland which is all about, you know, irish authors and the history of writing in Ireland. But she's just compiled a series of books which are essays about Thomas Kinsley, who was a famous Irish scholar, probably the preeminent Irish scholar. He only died a few years ago about on Thorn.
Speaker 2:So we have in Dundalk a place called Cú Chulainn's Castle which is on a mound. It's kind of on the outskirts of town and it's it's on a raised mound well above. It's about the highest point in town, I think. Um, and you've got the remaining of the remains of a tower. That's there now.
Speaker 2:I don't think it specifically has anything to do with cool holland. There was a famous wealthy smuggler who built a house there but it was burned down in a fire. But it's still called coholland's castle and in the field in front of it is a standing stone, um where he was supposed to have been killed. Um strapped to it as as the morrigan landed on his shoulder and and signaled that he had died. So it's steeped in mythology and there's a walk once a year where people walk from the midlands on foot across it's almost like a camino walk, if you like and they follow the route of Queen Maeve's army who came across to engage in battle with Cú Chulainn. So I mean again, it's that thing. It's on my doorstep, so I sort of take it for granted, but I'll send you a few links in an email and you can.
Speaker 1:Well, that would be wonderful and I can put them in the show notes. Okay, we're running out of time, but I do want to ask you a couple of things. One of them is in your opinion, what makes a good bookseller a great bookseller?
Speaker 2:Good bookseller? Great, I'll let you know when I get there. I'm not sure. Actually, I've been thinking about this a lot and I think a lot of it is down to obviously you need to be enthusiastic about books, you need to be in love with books, because if you're not in love with them, then you know it's a tough job to try and sell them to somebody who isn't or is maybe, you know, an occasional reader. But given that most people read within a certain comfort zone, if you like, I think once you do a job like yours or you do a job like mine, you read much more eclectically than you ever did before. But most people read within the comfort zone.
Speaker 2:And I could quite happily go from one end of the year to the other, skipping from James Lee Burke to Stephen King to Adam Neville to whoever. I never have to look at a new author ever, but I mean that takes the fun out of it ever, but I mean that takes the fun out of it. So I think understanding books, but also listening to the people who come in and out of your shop, because I don't know everything about books. I don't know everything about even the books that are in my shop. I'll often have somebody come up and buy a book and I'll always ask them why are you buying that book? I want to know, have they read it? Have they read the author before? Was it recommended to them?
Speaker 2:If somebody comes along and asks me to order a book, an author that I haven't heard of before, I'll make it a point of picking up that book when it comes in and, you know, flicking through it to see if I like the writing style. I mean, I think there are only so many stories out there, as Shakespeare said, and he's probably done them all as good as anyone will ever do them. But but the writing style you know the journey is is what makes it enjoyable to read. So, reading you know a few pages from a book, I say, yeah, I like that guy, I'll pick up one of his for myself, and I think I like to to think that you know the staff that you have, if you have. You know one of the other shops that I heard on one of your and it was funny because it was a book I love myself was talking about somebody who wanted a vampire novel, and well, I'm not the person to talk to, but there's somebody over there. Talk to them.
Speaker 1:Actually that was me. I was at the last bookstore downtown LA looking for vampire books.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I read that way before ever. I think I read that when it came out first. I picked it up in a hardback copy in a secondhand bookshop somewhere. So but I would like certain types of books and my staff, who are all very good.
Speaker 2:I work with members of my family and then we have a few people who come in and they all do a few days each. So you know you get people who only come in. They only want to come in when Sandra is there, or they only want to come in when May is there, and they'll be friendly and chatty and they'll come in, or they might pick up a book, but they come in to talk to the people because you know well, I know they like my book or you know I want to ask them about a book, you know. So I think, having having maybe, maybe you don't become a great bookseller individually, but I think as a collective in a bookshop, I think you know, as a team you can become a great bookselling team and I would never be anywhere without the team I have working with me.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think a good indie bookshop is all about the booksellers. Okay, Tom, what are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:What am I currently reading? Well, I've just finished one called Baby I Don't Care by Lee Server, which is a biography of. I mean, I'm a huge movie fan, particularly old movies, movies where you can hear the dialogue. You know, I want to be able to hear what the characters are saying, not the door closing or the you know or the cat in the backyard screaming. But I think that's just an age thing with my hearing. But I think that's just an age thing with my hearing. But I've always been a huge fan of Robert Mitchum and Lee Serber's biography carries him right from his early days as a kind of a hobo traveling across the country, right the way through his run ins with the law, right up until, you know when, the winds of war and his later career. So I've and I'm always reading two or three books at the same time. So the other books I'm reading is a series about a character called Jackson Lamb.
Speaker 1:Yes, you're talking about Slow Horses. Yes, I love the show. In fact, I just bought the first book by Mick Herron. I can't wait to start them. But how are the books? Did you enjoy them? I mean, Gary Oldman playing Jackson Lamb is fantastic.
Speaker 2:He's incredible. The books are laugh out loud funny. He's the most politically incorrect character. I mean, he's bad on the TV show, but in the books he's worse and he's a much stronger presence in the books. He's almost in every chapter in it nearly, whereas I think, maybe because of you know, gary oldman's check that he gets he's only in you know, um. But they are incredibly funny and very much on point.
Speaker 2:I was reading them as they came out over the years and you can see boris johnson in them. There is a character in it who is boris johnson, the faux guy who tends to be a bit of a, an idiot for the cameras, but he's ruthless behind it and he, the way he breaks down society and political um, uh, chicanery and and backstabbing, is incredible and you just fly through them. They are proper thrillers, but do do read them in sequence though, because, like, a lot of them are standalone. But the problem with them is that, because he's quite vicious with his characters and they do get bumped off, you'll maybe get used to a character in book three and then it'll refer to somebody who was in a previous book.
Speaker 1:They sound a little bit like the Bosch books here written by Michael Connelly.
Speaker 2:I love those two, yeah, and the other one, sorry. I just want to give a shout out as well, which I'm really looking forward to and I know if you're into movies, you like this one as well, as I just got this for Christmas and I haven't been around to reading it yet. It's called not your baby doll and I've only just started it, but it's it's. I'm really enjoying it. It's a biography of an actress called Anna May Wong who was around and she was never really. I think she was in a few big budget movies, but never the leading actress. But I love reading about old Hollywood and you know behind the scenes with old Hollywood and stuff like that, so I see the Coast Road there behind you as well. Is that the Coast Road?
Speaker 1:Yes, by Alan Murren. Oh, I love that book. Alan's been on the show. He's a lovely, lovely guy. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a fabulous book. Well, tom, thank you so much for being a guest on the show and it's been lovely chatting with you about books and talk and writers. It's been a lot of fun, thank you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you for asking Delightful. I really enjoyed it. Lovely to chat to you, Mandy, and we'll be in touch OK.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Tom Mookian, the owner of Row River Books. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at MandyJacksonBeverly and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson-Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, Adrienne Otterhahn and graphic design by Frances Perala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.