Kenny's Bookshop specializes in antiquarian, new, and secondhand volumes of Irish interest, Kenny's Art Gallery features the works of Irish artists, and the family business also includes an antiquarian map and print room and a book bindery that turns out exquisite leather volumes. Customers worldwide recognize the depth of knowledge about Irish literature and culture represented on the shop's bookshelves and in the members of the Kenny family themselves. If it's Irish or of Irish interest, the Kennys know it, whether it's literature, mythology, business, law, religion, art, language, medieval history, current affairs, sports, politics, children's books, genealogy, or nearly any other subject.

A Bibliophilic Inheritance

Maureen and Desmond Kenny both had literary backgrounds that nurtured their early start as bibliophiles. Desmond, whose father was a newspaperman and one of the founders of the Irish Tourist Board, and whose brother-in-law, Walter Macken, wrote the novels The Silent People and Rain on the Wind, took an arts degree at University College in Galway. Maureen's widowed mother emphasized education and kept books in her home even during difficult times. Maureen won a scholarship to University College, where she met Desmond on her first day. The couple married when both had completed their studies, and they opened their bookstore in a single rented room on Galway's High Street in 1940.

These days, five of Maureen and Desmond Kenny's six children run the day-to-day activities of the business. The Kenny children inherited their parents' love of books and recount anecdotes about earlier days, when their father traveled around Ireland buying books. One trip took the elder Kenny to Cork, where he bought a private library for �1,000. He returned to Galway singing and carting a carload of books, which the family fell upon in great excitement.

Left: Maureen Kenny, remarkable resource for a vast working knowledge of Irish books, has met many a literary luminary as matriarch of Kenny's Bookshop. Here, a recent visit with Frank McCourt, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Angela's Ashes.

After the first day of sorting, it appeared that a large portion of the collection consisted of sermons. The second day's work, to the Kennys' dismay, revealed pornography. By the third day, the senior Kenny was convinced his acquisition had been an outright silly decision. Then the Kennys' eldest son, Tom, in his twenties at the time, stumbled across a book in the collection that he recognized from a reference he'd seen years earlier. The recollection sent him scurrying to contact a specialist in England, who not only confirmed Tom's hunch about the volume's rarity but asked the selling price. Thinking on his feet, Tom answered �1,050 and thus instantly recouped more than the original purchase price of the entire lot. 'My father nearly squeezed the life out of me when I told him,' he remembers.

By dint of hard work and creative enterprise, Maureen and Desmond Kenny saw their shop through times when people weren't accustomed to spending their hard-earned resources on books. They operated a lending library from which customers could borrow books for two pence a week. They also sold secondhand schoolbooks, and many Galwegians still remember bargaining hard with Maureen Kenny to sell their barely used Latin and math textbooks. Mick Maloney, Ph.D., Irish folklore expert, and an adjunct professor of Irish studies in the honors program at Villanova University, explains that when the Kennys opened their shop, the West of Ireland was economically depressed. "There was a population drain; small farmers had to leave their land to find other work and often emigrated. Except for jobs in a few resort towns in the summer, there was little in the way of employment. Galway was a hum-drum town, gray and dull, and not the boom area it is today."

Maloney, who routinely calls on Kenny's when he visits Ireland, adds that Kenny's Bookshop "forecast the current renaissance in Irish literature, art, and culture. "Desmond Kenny, Jr. tells a story about the first auction his father attended during the lean days of World War II in a town north of Galway. The library of a Catholic priest who had converted to Protestantism was on the block. Kenny bought a whole roomful of books on "the problems," as the strife between the North of Ireland and the South is called. He paid two pounds for the entire lot but was able to take home only as many as he could pack into four chests and load onto a horse-drawn cart. "We'd love to have those books today," remarks Des.

In the 1950s, to support his growing family, Desmond Kenny left the shop to take a job in a textile printing factory. That experience gave him an insight into commerce and marketing and foreign travel that he later used to advantage in the bookstore. The fifties passed with Maureen in the shop full-time, her husband at her side when he wasn't in the factory. To attract customers - tourists and locals alike - the couple introduced handmade Irish crafts and invited artists to show their work in the shop. At the time, exhibiting Irish artists and artisans was a practice unheard of outside of Dublin. Today, Kennys continues to celebrate this aspect of Ireland's creative spirit in its adjoining art gallery, whose exhibits spill into the bookstore's rooms and hallways. Prints, paintings, engravings, and sculpture live among the books. A few years ago the Kennys opened a second art gallery in the nearby town of Spiddal, a community with a tradition of supporting local artisans and craftspeople. This gallery, managed by Tom's daughter Karen, is named An D�mhlann, Irish for "meeting place of the followers of arts." "We deal in works of art, whether they're framed or bound,' says Tom Kenny, who developed the original gallery in the seventies.

Pluck of the Irish

Tom's bedroom housed the stencil machine used to print the shop's earliest catalogues in the 1960s. The family assembled the catalogues on the kitchen table, mailed them to universities and libraries around the world, then awaited orders from far-off Boston, San Francisco, and Australia. From those catalogue sales, Tom says, there was a "knock-on effect" that spurred growth.

Tom, now in his fifties, received his university degree in science, which was seen as a springboard to industry and economic advancement, but continued to work in the shop on weekends and holidays. He recalls, "I can remember standing with my father in the shop when he asked if I'd like to work full-time." When Tom answered yes, his father responded, "So would I." Desmond, Sr. seized the opportunity to leave the textile firm and return to the bookstore.

With that happy decision, a "new energy" infused the business. Buying trips increased and the printing of catalogues accelerated, and Tom and his father traveled extensively in the United States, visiting libraries eager to buy recently published Irish books. Since print-runs of books published in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland number in the thousands of copies rather than in the hundreds of thousands, the Kennys' access to these scarcities put their services in high demand. From the relationships cultivated in those years, Kenny's still acts as adviser to such institutions as the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and numerous universities, scholars, and private collectors around the world, assessing collections, consulting on acquisitions, recommending how to develop Irish collections, and supplying books published in Ireland. 'Our parents always taught us to be willing to have a go at new ideas,' Tom says.

The 1970s saw an expansion in the Kennys' business interests and a broadening of their contribution to Irish culture. Desmond, Sr. continued to travel in Europe and the United States buying and selling books and bindings. Tom Kenny developed one of Ireland's finest commercial art galleries, and the family opened a book bindery. Tom's brother Gerry is in charge of the bindery, located in nearby Salthill, where a re-bound 1820 volume of A History of Galway, by James Hardiman, rests one shelf away from a handsome, hand-bound edition of contemporary Irish writer Maeve Binchy's best-selling novel Evening Class and James Boyle O'Reilly's The Poetry and Song of Ireland. Gerry and his staff can reclaim an old book, bind a special edition, or prepare a volume for an official occasion. Clients can choose to have a book bound entirely in leather or quarter-bound with a cover of hand-marbled paper or buckram. Tooling is done in twenty-two-karat gold and can be ornate or simple. Over the years Gerry has collected a wide variety of typefaces and curlicues for the finishing work.

A Gathering Ground

When Kenny's Bookshop celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1990, the family was feted by the city's mayor and the two-hundred-year-old Galway Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Patrick Hillery, then Ireland's president, opened the shop's special exhibition, Faces in a Bookshop, for which Kenny's had commissioned portraits of more than one hundred Irish writers by seventy-five Irish artists. For the occasion the Kennys published a commemorative book, also titled Faces in a Bookshop.

The family knows most everyone in the Irish literary and art world, and it's not uncommon for one of these luminaries to drop in. An astonishing collection of hundreds of signed photos of writers and artists who have visited covers nearly every available surface in the shop. Name a name and the Kennys probably have a story to go with it.

Brendan Behan would "stick his head into the shop on his way to the Aran Islands or after visiting a nearby pub," recalls Des Kenny, Jr. "My mother used to say, 'For heaven's sake, Brendan, why don't you come in before you go to the pub?'" Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and his family frequently stop by. Des, Jr. recalls the time Heaney and some of the Kennys were at a nearby pub when a dustman (garbage collector) approached the group and asked, 'Are you Seamus Heaney, the poet? Would you do me a favor and shake my hand? I think you're great."

Two years ago Kenny's completed an extensive renovation that expanded the bookshop and art gallery into an additional storefront facing the street behind. John McGahern, author of the novel The Dark, did the honors of presiding at the shop's reopening. Says Tom Kenny, "We told the architect to change everything and change nothing." But they're still a bit pinched for space. "We can't go up or down to either side," he adds. Though it still may not be big enough, the enlarged shop is a handsome, warm space that invites bibliophiles and art lovers - and just plain browsers - to roam from room to room, peek around corners, and climb stairs in search of the next batch of treasures. The space between the two buildings, once an open area used by a butcher, was incorporated into Kenny's as a three-story atrium with a skylight. Contemporary Irish art is displayed among the books along with the countless numbers of photos of writers and artists. The renovation uncovered a fifteenth century fireplace on an upper floor, and for the first floor houses a rounded medieval doorway carved from stone. Stained glass windows that James Joyce's Ulysses branded "Mr. Lewis Werner's cheerful windows," rescued from a torn down Dublin building, have now found asylum in the bookshop.

Taken on Trust

Typical of the Kennys' seemingly boundless entrepreneurial energy, Des, Jr. carved out a business niche that has evolved into a huge success. One day in 1988 an American customer was going from room to room, swearing all the while and growing more agitated the longer he stayed in the shop. When Des no longer could ignore the tourist and offered his assistance, the man exploded in frustration, "I can only afford to travel to Ireland every two or three years, and here are all these Irish books that I can't get at home!" Des talked with the tourist to learn what his interests were and offered to ship packages of books to him in the United States.

So began the Kenny's Irish Book Parcels, a plan for people living outside Ireland to keep up on new books of Irish interest. Every few months Kenny's sends a shipment of books to each customer on the list. No two packages are the same, and the plan can be modified to suit any interest. Using "instinct", Des assembles his parcels to cater to each customer's tastes. "We have people who say, 'I like history but not history', or 'I like books that are a bit cracked,'" he explains. "Someone may want only short stories or high literature. If I get it wrong, the books are fired back". He follows up with a personal phone call to each first time Book Parcels customer and keeps a journal of all the transactions.

Kenny's Book Parcels customers number 1,300 on five continents, and the list continues to grow. One client e-mailed the Kennys, "The last bunch that included information on Connemara was wonderful. I especially like it when you send me twin language books because it helps me with my learning Irish. I can compare and learn that way". The customer requested that future orders include a basic geology book of Ireland in English, a volume from a children's series by Mairead N� Ghr�da, and books with "old photographs" that would give a "feel" for the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, and the Aran Islands. Another client, Angela Botzer of Silver Spring, Maryland, a fiddler who plays traditional Irish music, says, "The book Parcels plan makes me feel like I'm on the cutting edge of traditional Irish music". Des Kenny sends her newly published songbooks that are unavailable in the United States.

While compiling his parcels, Des might be found going from room to room, removing books from the shelves and talking to himself, apparently undeterred by his brother Conor's observation that although staff members understand he is "talking to his customers", shop patrons might not comprehend.

Such personalized customer service extends to other reaches, too. Tom tells a story about an American who visited the shop one Valentine's Day in the late 1960s. He eventually chose P.W. Joyce's History of Ireland but did not have the cash to pay for it, so Tom told the unbelieving man he'd accept a check. The two struck up a conversation, and the Kennys took the gentleman to a pub for more stories and laughter with the locals. The customer was William Randolph Hearst, Jr.

Not long after, the shop began receiving requests from around the United States for copies of P.W. Joyce's History of Ireland. Hearst, it turned out, had written a syndicated article about how the Irish booksellers had taken a foreigner's check on trust - and the article had generated the orders.

Desmond Kenny, Sr. died in 1990, but Maureen Kenny still works in the shop every day, providing what her husband called the most thorough practical knowledge of Irish books of anybody, anywhere. Technology at best only complements rather than replaces such good old-fashioned insight, but expanding their business to the Internet has enhanced the Kennys' ability to provide the best service possible. Their many-faceted Website was voted one of the three best in the European Union last fall.

As Kenny's Bookshop approaches its sixtieth anniversary and Maureen and Desmond's grandchildren enter the picture, the Kenny industriousness and humor endure. Commenting on the rich legacy created for the family by the formidable couple, Tom says, "They have given us values: the importance of family, charity, and perseverance, and a love of things Irish, especially books. They taught us that the work of Irish writers and painters is as good as can be found anywhere." And that gift extends beyond Galway to wherever in the world there's an interest in all things Irish.

Pauline Dininny is a writer in Washington, D.C.