ONE of the splendid advantages of having your own business is that nobody can give you a metallic handshake and your walking papers from work at the onset of a particular birthday. On April 28th, Maureen Kenny will celebrate her 80th birthday. Maureen can still be found holding court every day in Kennys Bookshop on Galway's High Street which she and her late husband, Des, opened more than half a century ago.If "bookshop" is inseparable from any mention of Maureen Kenny, so too is the word "grace".
For decades, she has personified the elusive combination of success in business with a genuinely, old-fashioned courtesy which guarantees return visits from customers. "It was 1940," she says, recounting the origins of the shop. "Des and I had both just graduated from UCG and wanted to stay in Galway. A friend of Des suggested a bookshop.
We thought it was an absolutely wonderful idea, if a bit mad."The base of the Kennys 1940 original stock was donated by friends and relations. "They emptied their attics for us. Trunkfuls of books arrived." Later, countryhouse library auctions, amongst them Dromoland, formed a significant part of their stock.
They rented what was initially a much smaller premises on the same site, and lived above the shop for some years, until moving out to Salthill. Today, five of Maureen Kenny's six children work in the business with her. Recently, the entire shop has been redesigned and renovated, with a very beautiful central atrium. "The builders found beams dating from 1482, from the original structure, so no wonder they were beginning to creak under the weight of all the books."
Anyone visiting Kennys will probably spend much of their time looking at some of the 1,200 signed photographs of writers which are squirreled around the shop, as they will examining the books.
The photos are as much a social history of the shop's customers as a valuable pictorial archive of Irish literature.
Maureen's only regret is that they didn't start taking them earlier. "We started in the late 1960s, around the time of Liam O'Flaherty's 80th birthday party. He danced a jig in here and someone took a picture." There are now so many photos competing with shelf space on the walls that not all of them are on show. "We're thinking of putting some of them in a book and displaying it under glass somewhere in the shop. We'd turn a page every day.
Like the Book of Kells!"
She is politely unfazed by the number of British-owned bookshops currently in Ireland - none of which has come to Galway. "It doesn't affect us because we are so different." In the early 1990s, Kennys was the first Irish bookshop to go on the web. It now has customers all over the globe. "So in that way, you could say we have a world-wide premises," she says.
Although the Kennys experimented in the early days with bookstands in some of the grander hotels around the country, as well as a shop in Maynooth, today there is only the one famous bookshop in Galway. But then, there's only one Maureen Kenny and it's impossible to imagine a Kennys Bookshop without the co-founder sitting in the middle of it all and smiling away.
© Irish Times, April 14th, 1998
© Photograph by Eric Luke, Irish Times, April 14th, 1998