![\"Historian](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/4644250_2_articleinlinemobile_HinterlandPhotocall4.jpg\" "\\"Historian")
Historian and broadcaster Myles Dungan and local schoolchildren Dara Sheridan, seven, and R\u00f3is\u00edn Byrne, six, outside the Courthouse in Kells, Co Meath, at the launch of the 2025 Hinterland Festival of Literature & Arts programme.<\/p>\nAntonia Daly owns Antonia\u2019s Bookstore in Trim, Co Meath. She is also on the committee of the Hinterland Festival Kells, which takes place from June 26 to June 29.<\/p>\n
When I decided to open a bookshop, I didn\u2019t really have a history or a background in bookselling, I actually had a diploma in civil and structural engineering. I was working, and I was studying part time at night to finish my degree. I always had it in the back of my mind that I\u2019d love to open a bookshop, and my parents and my husband told me to go ahead and do it, that I would have the degree to fall back on if it didn\u2019t work out, but to give it a go and see. And here we are, we\u2019re celebrating 20 years open in December.<\/p>\n
I grew up in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, but my dad is from Meath and I would have spent a lot of time up here. When I started talking about opening a bookshop, I looked at a lot of different towns but there was something about Trim \u2014 when you come into it, you have this big fairytale castle and the Tidy Towns committee here are amazing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n There\u2019s flowers everywhere; I come in here at 8am to open up and there are people out picking up rubbish on their own time\n <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a beautiful town, and the perfect town for a bookshop. The library in Trim is fantastic as well and the schools really promote reading. It really is a town of readers.<\/p>\n
What does it involve?<\/p>\n
A bit of everything. Normally, my day to day would be ordering stock, doing displays, accounting, and paperwork. But at the moment, it\u2019s even busier because it\u2019s schoolbook season. We\u2019re dealing directly with schools now rather than parents, so we would be doing quotes with schools, talking through what they might need, and then ordering the books and delivering them.<\/p>\n
We also have the Hinterland Festival, and I\u2019m currently putting together all the books to sell at that. We have to go through all the authors that are coming, and make sure that we have everything they\u2019ve written.<\/p>\n
What do youlike most about it?<\/p>\n
You have the lovely experience of meeting your customers in the shop day to day, then at Hinterland, there are people who\u2019ve come from all over the country that we see every year.<\/p>\n
Historian and broadcaster Myles Dungan and local schoolchildren Dara Sheridan, seven, and R\u00f3is\u00edn Byrne, six, outside the Courthouse in Kells, Co Meath, at the launch of the 2025 Hinterland Festival of Literature & Arts programme.<\/p>\n
\u00a0So you\u2019re catching up with them again. It\u2019s a fabulous festival and it\u2019s lovely to meet the authors and just to get out there and do something different.<\/p>\n
What do you like least about it?<\/p>\n
Nobody enjoys doing the paperwork.<\/p>\n
\n You could probably make it easier on yourself if you stayed up to date on it day to day, but I think we all tend to pile it up in the corner and think ‘I\u2019ll get to that’, and then you regret not keeping on top of it\n <\/p>\n
I actually enjoy the other parts, like the ordering and all of that because there is the excitement of getting stuff in and seeing what people are buying.<\/p>\n
Three desert island books<\/p>\n
My first one came out 20 years ago, it was a big seller when we opened the shop \u2014 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. When I read that, I just wanted to go to Carcassonne. And myself and my mum actually did go there, just because we had read that book.<\/p>\n
For the next one, I would definitely have a classic, I\u2019m torn between Little Women or A Christmas Carol. I\u2019d probably go with A Christmas Carol, because if you\u2019re going to be stuck on a desert island, you won\u2019t have Christmas, and I do love a Charles Dickens every so often.<\/p>\n
My last one would be Dissolution by CJ Sansom, who unfortunately passed away last year. The first time I read it, the way he described things, I could smell London in the 1500s and taste what they were eating. He has a style of writing that means you\u2019re completely immersed in the place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antonia Daly owns Antonia\u2019s Bookstore in Trim, Co Meath. She is also on the committee of the Hinterland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[10112,3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-149547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books-features-and-news","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114608347854495026","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}