What’s On – A Look at Trinity Then and Now with Lilliput Press

WORDS: Lily Ni Dhomhnaill

The Lilliput Press, an independent publishing house based in Stoneybatter, will contribute twofold to Trinity’s literary calendar this month. First is a throwback to an earlier time. Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Eighties will be launched in the Long Room this evening. The third in the Trinity Tales series, it looks at the atmosphere of Trinity in the eighties era against a wider backdrop of economic depression, the Troubles and global goings-on. Among others, Anne Enright, David McWilliams, Ivana Bacik, and Pauline McGlinn remember their lecturers (including Brendan Kennelly and Mary Robinson), their fellow students and their own personal experiences in the ‘pluralistic island of intellect and swagger’ that was Trinity in the super-trendy eighties.

The Lilliput Press is itself a child of the eighties. Starting in a West Meath farmhouse in 1984, the Lilliput team moved to Stoneybatter in 1992 and made a name for themselves as an independent small press specializing in Irish fiction, memoir and biography.  For Lilliput, as for TCD, the last 30 years have brought huge changes. Namely: Amazon. Despite consistent successes and increasing publicity in terms of profit they have, like most traditional booksellers, fallen victim to the internet.

This is surprising, as they’ve had a lot of public success recently. Their novel The Spinning Heart, by Donal Ryan, made the Man Booker longlist this year. The film What Richard Did, released last October to great critical success, is based on Kevin Power’s A Bad Day In Blackrock, also published by Lilliput. But apparently publicity is not enough, according to founder Antony Farrell.

“We’ve had all sorts of glamourous successful books in the last year but the backlist has gone to hell, right down. So financially we haven’t had a good year. And I mean we have three people on salary you know so. It’s difficult.”

Despite the big names, the backlist (the older titles, the ones whose sales really matter) is suffering due to online competitors. They have, of course, updated their trade, and now run an active website selling ebooks, but they still rely heavily on selling ‘real’ books in ‘real’ bookshops.

“What they call sneeringly ‘brick and mortar bookshops,’ you know, where you go to browse and you buy things you don’t expect and that’s the whole purpose of it. But people are lazy, they like things delivered to their home.”

Understandably for a publisher, Farrell places huge emphasis on the beauty and unity of the book as a physical object.

“Bookmakers – that’s how I would see us. We produce beautiful objects. The challenge now is to persuade people to pay for those beautiful objects as opposed to going online and buying ebooks… The derivation of book is – I think – from wood, from tree. The physical thing. Whereas an ebook is non-physical, which is a contradiction in terms. I think people need the physical expression of the words. But, you know, you can read faster on a kindle or an iPad.”

Which is a mixed blessing in itself.

“Yes, it means you retain very little. We are in an amnesiac world; people forget the previous generation. But publishing is a link with the past so it’s important to establish that.”

Lilliput is not just a link to the past, however. Their other Trinity-related novel this month has a picture of a girl taking an iPhone selfie on the cover. Elske Rahill’s “sometimes shocking, darkly irreverent but stirring” Between Dog and Wolf is a novel based very definitely around contemporary life. Set in modern day TCD, following three final-year English students, this book complements Trinity Tales despite the difference in genre. This month The Lilliput Press brings us both Trinity past and Trinity present.

Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Eighties will be launched this evening (8th October) in the Long Room at 6.30pm.

Between Dog and Wolf by Elske Rahill is due for release at the end of the month.

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