There are ways and means of encouraging children to read, and Jim Byrne seems to have cracked the code: youngsters and their parents happily throng the small group of bookshops he runs in the south-east, which got a new addition the other day.
His latest venture has opened on Tullow Street in Carlow - the Grafton Street of Carlow, according to Jim - an addition to The Enniscorthy Bookshop on Court Street in the town and The Wexford Bookshop on North Main Street. A shop he recently purchased on High Street, Kilkenny will be opened as a bookshop next spring. His bookshop in Wexford has a deceptively small shopfront. Inside, its ground floor ablaze with strip lighting, it was busy with browsers last Saturday. One table invited passers-by to try their hand at Italian and Thai cookery with books on the subject piled high. Another was laden with novels marked down to £5 while yet another proffered local and national history books. Shelves carried the usual medical, travel and fiction genres. A fairly straightforward bookshop.
Towards the back, however, an escalator ferried children and parents to the first floor - the toy department. Baby-born, Barbie, Kelsey, Your Size Shirley, Barney, board-games and computer games jostled with arts and crafts, all leading towards the corner at the back, where schoolbooks and exam papers are stocked. Happy children wandered everywhere. Lure them in with toys and they might linger to read a book seems to be the recipe.
"I like to think our bookshops are different," says Jim. "The layout is different, the concept is different, especially for a small town."
He has been in the retail business since 1976. When he opened his first bookshop in Enniscorthy there was, he says, no other bookshop in the town. A bookshop was a rarity in a provincial town in those days. "It's been very rewarding to see the number of people who are now voracious readers. We have a totally computerised system, and if we don't have a title we can order it from anywhere in the world."
Patricia Scanlan, Kevin Whelan, Colm Toibin and Wexford historian Nicholas Furlong are among those who have done signings or had book launches at the shops. Jim had a small stand at this year's National Ploughing Championships and sold countless copies of Tara Road, the new novel by Maeve Binchy, who was meeting and greeting people at the Irish Times tent at the site in Ferns.
