A Long-Term Commitment

Caroline Horn has an article in ‘The Bookseller’ that tells a sobering story about the current state of the children’s publishing industry in the UK – one that can obviously be applied to Ireland as well. Many well established children’s authors and illustrators are really struggling to make a living, partly due to a reduction in sales, partly due…

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The Punishment Should Fit the Crime

The language and subject matter in this post may not be suitable for younger readers. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide. I’m thoroughly sick of the callous and arrogant way the Catholic Church has dealt with the overwhelming number of cases of child abuse by their people. Not only have they permitted it to happen, created…

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A Swift Reading

Judging by my last write-up on Peter Falk, and on this one, I’ve really got to get my posts out quicker. On Friday, the 1st of July (yes, that’s over a week ago), Maedhbh and I were in Trim to take part in an event for the Trim Swift Festival. The festival celebrates the life, works and the legacy…

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Just One More Thing . . .

Any regular viewer of ‘Columbo’ waited for that moment, those words: ‘Just one more thing . . .’. The moment you knew the scruffy, shambling, diffident detective was about to nail his suspect to the wall with a damning piece of evidence. It normally came after a drawn-out process, as the murderer went from being dismissive of this rumpled,…

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Reading from a New Angle

It might be going a bit overboard to call it ‘a revolution’, but here’s an interesting idea, as featured on the Mail Online site. Hodder have imported a new publishing format from the Netherlands. Basically, it’s a paperback novel you read with the spine turned horizontally, with the pages in landscape position. The paper is extremely thin – based…

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