The website that liked books so much it published one

I've come to the cafe at Books Upstairs to meet Maurice Earls and Enda O'Doherty, co-editors of the Dublin Review of Books. As steaming mugs of the black stuff are brought to our table, Earls nods out the window at D'Olier Street below us. It's a great place for a magazine to be based, he says.

For 200 years and more, this part of Dublin has been a hive of publishing activity, buzzing with pamphlets and journals of all shapes and sizes. The Dublin University Magazine, the major conservative intellectual magazine of the 19th century, was produced just across the road. The Nation was here for a while. So was Irish Monthly.

The Dublin Review of Books, which has an office on the top floor of this building, feels itself to be at the heart of this historic enterprise.

When it comes to the history of periodicals and magazines in Ireland, there's good news and bad news. The tradition may be long and distinguished, but many Irish journals have led dismayingly short lives. All the more reason, then, for Earls and O'Doherty to celebrate their magazine's 10th birthday with a beautiful print anthology, Space to Think.

From its beginning, the DRB broke with publishing tradition in several key ways. For one thing, the editors opted to publish their magazine online – a startlingly radical move back in 2006 – and to offer it for free, flying in the face of the closed-shop subscription world of academe. These decisions have paid off. The DRB has readers as far away as São Paolo, Singapore and Japan, as well as a solid readership in the US and Canada and, of course, Ireland.

Online to print

Isn’t it slightly strange to be toasting the success of a web-based publishing enterprise with a doorstopper book? Absolutely not, they insist. After all, the journal is based on reviews of printed books.

“We love print,” says Earls. “Going digital doesn’t mean we had any sense that print was passe or anything like that.”

“Going digital from the very beginning, I think, was a huge part of us making it to the first 10 years,” O’Doherty adds. “The headaches that would have accompanied print bills, and trying to get a magazine out to 50 places in Ireland – and then trying to get paid – would have worn us down. This way, there isn’t any difficulty for anyone, however far-flung, to read it.”

Space to Think is "the book of the website" in the best possible sense. The title expresses the magazine's raison d'etre: giving writers the space to develop an argument, the freedom to develop an idea. Under such headings as "People", "Novels and Novelists", "Contemporary Controversies" and "Europe and Beyond", it features pieces by Roy Foster, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Denis Donoghue.

Topics under discussion move from Kristallnacht and the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Irish language, from Kevin Barry's treatment of John Lennon in his novel Beatlebone to the meaning of Ryanair.

How did they choose what to put in? Are there essays that they really love that didn’t make the cut? “Hundreds,” says Earls. “It’s really a sliver. We wanted to represent the range of subjects that we’ve covered.”

For a sliver, it's a pretty chunky one, running to 503 pages. But with the average DRB essay varying in length from 2,500-4,000 words, its ongoing success has blown the conventional wisdom that people can't or won't read lengthy, closely argued pieces of writing online right out of the water.

“Some people find reading online tiring and some people don’t,” says O’Doherty. “There are people who are reading digitally all day every day, and have no difficulty with it. Other people like the look and feel of print.”

And, as Earls points out, if you’re especially taken – or especially puzzled – by a particular article, you can easily print it off from the website.

What have they learned from 10 years of online publishing? First and foremost, they say, is the importance of careful editing. That’s partly because so much material in cyberspace is inconsistent, if not outright incoherent.

“One of our principles,” says O’Doherty, “is that even if the subject is thought to be difficult, the essay should be written in such a way that anyone can follow it with a modest degree of effort.”

“We’ve also discovered,” Earls adds, “that a lot of experts, whether in the hard sciences or politics or economics, along with the bedrock of literature, history and culture, relish the idea of talking to a wider audience and are willing to make the effort to make their writing enjoyable and accessible.”

Writing for readers

This is perhaps more difficult in some fields than in others. “If you’re writing about physics for a general audience,” O’Doherty says, “you have to make a special effort. Philosophy also. Sociologists sometimes find it difficult to get away from their concepts. Historians, on the other hand – and I don’t think it’s just Irish historians – write generally for you and me.”

Though the editors have stuck to their guns on their core intellectual ideals, the DRB has evolved over its decade of online operations. It has, for example, introduced blog posts, which are updated between issues. "The posts are generally on a lighter, more quirky note," says O'Doherty. "They are often a suggestion of an idea rather than a well worked idea – which is what we're looking for elsewhere."

Most recently, the appearance of Space to Think has brought them a plethora of unexpected but welcome feedback.

"When we wrote to tell people about the book and invite them to the launch," Earls says, "so many people responded to tell us what they thought of the DRB that, for once, opening our emails was a bit of a joy."

One of those emails was from Cork historian Joe Lee. Currently based at New York University, he couldn't make it to the launch, but was happy to deliver his verdict on the DRB.

"A consistently challenging approach across a wide range of topics and disciplines has made the Dublin Review of Books one of the most stimulating of all Irish periodical publications, past or present," Prof Lee wrote.

Now that's what you'd call a good review of your Review.

Space to Think is available from bookshops at €25, or from drb.ie at €20.

PANEL: SNAPSHOTS FROM SPACE TO THINK
"A Modest Proposal's baby-eating humour still has the capacity to shock but in the week of its publication one Dublin shop made a window display of a mummified corpse to attract passers-by, likening the skin's texture to a freshly-baked cake of puff pastry."
– James Ward on Leo Damrosch's biography of Jonathan Swift

"The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were an odd mixture of the soft-headed and the hard-nosed. If they could be a dreamy, spook-ridden, eccentric bunch, they also had a keen eye for the price of an acre or the cost of a domestic servant."
– Terry Eagleton on Selina Guinness's memoir, The Crocodile by the Door

"After reading [this] impeccably researched and documented portrayal of the founders of Existentialism, it is hard not to conclude that they were dreadful people: politically and morally reprehensible, and unwashed and smelly into the bargain."
– Lara Marlowe on Carole Seymour-Jones's study of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, A Dangerous Liaison