Sandspout Magazine

The Sandspout will be issued alongside the shop’s publishing interest, the ABPress. Its content will be serendipitous and random. A new, fourth issue will be available for 6th February.

The magazine started as an in-house project in the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford, which costed in December 2017. To date there has been three issues. Each issue highlighted new writing from people associated with the shop and the many writing groups that would meet there. It included commentary, blog style pieces, fiction, either extract or short pieces, and poetry.

Here is a cartoon depiction of the launch evening for issue 2 of November, 2016, by Andrew Kay (whose cartoons are featured in the magazine). [invisibules.org]

Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry collection The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber, 2016) is lyrical and observant, an elegiac lament, beautiful so often, riddled with memories of a childhood spent near Cork.

Bookshops were very much part of Bernard’s youth, a journey to Cork often only a pilgrimage to visit them. Connolly’s Bookshop in the centre of the city had fought many commercial battles; it closed in 2014, a casualty of a changing world that made less sense of local community.

(This video was filmed in a previous bookshop.)

Sandspout Magazine

Bernard O’Donoghue reads ‘Connolly’s Bookshop’