Penrallt Gallery & Lyfrau’r Senedd-dy Bookshops
March's Bookshop of the Month is actually two shops - the Penrallt Gallery Bookshop and sister store, Siop Lyfrau’r Senedd-dy, both busily flying the flag for Wales. We caught up with owners Geoff and Diane to find out why they opened a second store, and to talk about books, photography and literary festivals.
1. What was the vision behind opening your bookshop, and that of your sister shop in 2021?
We moved to Wales in 2010 (Geoff is originally from Aberdare) and opened Penrallt Gallery Bookshop a year later, with our home above the bookshop. The ‘gallery’ element was to use our specialism in photography to curate work by photographers in Wales and to identify emerging photographers with an annual open submission exhibition. There would always be, unusually, exhibition wall space alongside a growing range of new and second-hand books.
As we built more bookcases, the wall space shrank a little but still provides plenty of room for photographers new to exhibiting, which we encourage. We rented space for a separate gallery, Ffotogaleri y Gofeb, three doors along in late 2017; the pandemic and social distancing led us to relocate our growing photographic book collection there. We have one of the most extensive collections of photography books in Wales, perhaps in the UK.
Meanwhile, our regular First Thursday events with authors brought together a community of readers, so over the 12 years we have become a hub not just for book lovers and writers but also photographers. We believed that was our lot until we ‘retired’. When, in 2021, we were invited to open another bookshop in the town, in Owain Glyndwr’s Parliament House (Senedd-dy), we took on the challenge as non-Welsh speakers to extend our already bilingual stock to concentrate on Welsh language books and to employ fluent Welsh speakers. It was essential to create a bookshop to compliment the Senedd-dy’s historical and cultural importance; it had also been the town library until the 1970s and the bookshop now uses a wonderful reading table (pictured) for display.
Siop Lyfrau’r Senedd-dy’s browsing experience offers customers a selection that reflects Wales’s rich literary canon in both languages including books new and old(er) across the writing genres. It also serves visitors who want to learn about Wales and travel around the country, walking, sightseeing and understanding how we see ourselves and our place in the world as one of its smaller nations. The children’s section offers a fantastic range of books by Welsh authors, primarily Welsh language with some English language and bilingual titles. The range for ages 7-11 is carefully chosen to encourage Welsh language reading in older primary school children.
During the pandemic it became clear that Pen’rallt was too confined a space for author events, so there was the added bonus of using the rest of the main hall for events. Senedd-dy is fast becoming an important venue for book launches, with pre-launches of some recent works taking place before the Hay festival in 2022 and programmed into the Amdani, Fachynlleth Gwyl Lenyddol, Literary Festival, 31 March – 2 April 2023.
2. What kind of books do well in your bookshops?
We choose books that align with our own principles and beliefs, so there is a ‘curated’ feel to the bookshop that is often identified by customers. Fortunately this approach works well with most customers and we have built up a reputation for stocking books that are not always available elsewhere. Our contact with Sally Sharp, our Yale Rep, is particularly important in this respect. Books by local authors launched by us, tend to sell very well but, generally, our best selling titles are about current issues such as the environment, politics, translation and art. With illustrated children’s books also strong sellers.
Books that do well in Siop Lyfrau’r Senedd-dy are the latest Welsh language publications across all genres including novels, cookery, sport, contemporary political thinking, art and music. Nature, travel guides and travel writing and maps of Wales. Resources for Welsh learners, Welsh history, social history, Welsh mythology and books about historical landmarks in Wales. Books on other small nations and the Welsh diaspora, including the ‘London Welsh’.
3. How do you go around choosing them to line your shelves?
We buy our second-hand books individually wherever we can find them. We tend not to buy from customers, never do house clearances or go to auctions, so that we can maintain the high quality of our stock. New titles are chosen on the basis of following the publishing industry news, reading reviews, talking to customers, visits from reps. and what we think will work in our bookshop.
4. If you could recommend one book published in the last year, which would it be?
We have chosen Cymru Fydd by Wiliam Owen Roberts, a dystopian novel, written in Welsh, set in a Wales of 2090, a “thriving and powerful” Wales, but a nightmarish Wales too. It is of much significance to us as it is the first book published by O’r Pedwar Gwynt, the Welsh Language Literary Review (imagine the quality of London Review of Books looking out at the European literary scene from Wales and in Welsh). We successfully launched the book at the Senedd-dy in 2022, attracting other writers as well as readers from near and far to an entirely Welsh language event.
Pen’rallt’s partnership with O’r Pedwar Gwynt is undoubtedly one of the highlights for us when we look back over the past 12 years. In Siop Lyfrau’r Senedd-dy, O’r Pedwar Gwynt, now has its official home. Many of the speakers or featured writers at this year’s festival regularly write, edit and contribute to the review. The venue is very beautiful and a perfect space to hold events.
5. And finally, we see you have a literary festival coming up at the end of March which is very exciting – tell us more about that.
The idea for a festival – Amdani Fachynlleth – began tentatively in 2021. Inspired by the life of Jan Morris, her description of Machynlleth, the place where journeys meet / lle mae llwybrau’n cyfarfod, and as always ‘a junction of powers and influences’, continues to inform the programming of these annual Spring weekends. And we can boast that we have book launches and author events as ‘way before Hay!’ Although the ambition is not corporate, more an opportunity for visitors to the festival and this beautiful location to get a taste of the cultured life of a small rural Welsh town.
We have a stellar line-up for the festival, with authors taking part a mix of ‘world famous round here’ such as Mike Parker, author of our best selling ‘On the Red Hill’ whose next book, All the Wide Border, a book that looks at Britishness as much as where Wales shades into England, we’ll launch as the penultimate event of the festival and other prestigious authors from Wales and over the border. Opening the festival are art historian Peter Lord and historian of music, Rhian Davies, with a profusely illustrated talk based on their recent book The Art of Music: Branding the Welsh Nation. Insights by the book’s designer, Isobel Gillan, will open up the elaborate process of Art book production and harper and teacher Rhiain Bebb will bring some of the harps pictured ‘to life’. Over the weekend there’ll be Talking Cooking with an African Twist with north Wales food guru, Maggie Ogunbanwo; another illustrated talk by The Lost Rainforests of Britain, author, Guy Shrubsole; Tom Bullough and Julie Brominicks, writers who walk Wales not as tourists but as observers and social chroniclers of its landscape now – contemporary examples perhaps of George Borrow; Simon Brooks and Huw L. Williams, Welsh historians of ideas will ask is there a risk, in the age of global knowledge, that a Welsh understanding of the world might be lost? Mererid Puw Davies proposes that women as writers are producers of a culture that offers an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxies, as she traces the life and work of her novelist grandmother, Elena Puw Morgan; and so much more.
To check the festival programme, please visit the website using the button below.