LooseLeaves SadbhWriters, readers and book lovers got a shock this week with news that Kenny's Bookshop, located on Galway's High Street for 65 years, is to close early in the New Year. Popping into its atmospheric, low-ceilinged, bookish sequence of rooms the minute they hit the city was a habit for many. Always astute booksellers, the family has now decided that this is the perfect time to take the operation fully online.
"In 1994 we became the second bookshop in the world to go online. A shop in San Francisco got there first, though they are now gone. We knew nothing about it [the internet] except that it was going to be huge; instinct told us that," says Tom Kenny. "Twenty per cent of all books sold in America last year were sold online and the overheads of selling online compared to in a city centre location are startling; why not avail of that?" Though there was a huge emotional attachment to the High Street shop, forged in family blood, sweat and tears, it was now cost-effective to take this new direction of full-scale internet retailing.
Already Kenny's has more than 200,000 books for sale on various web portals and their own site, www.kennys.ie, is renowned worldwide for books of Irish interest. "We sell James Joyce in Japanese and John McGahern in French and the Irish Studies area is expanding all the time," says Tom. The regular trips family members began to make to the US in the early 1980s, knocking on library and university doors, alerting people to books they might need for their collections, had been a huge factor in growing their market, he says. The fact that many of the Irish authors they were selling had iconic status proved a great calling card; the fact that the Kennys knew most of them well, an added bonus.
When news broke of the shop's imminent closure, the same question was on the lips of many fans: what would happen to the huge collection of photographs of authors, who have browsed at the shop or read there over the decades, that line its walls? Many of them were taken by Tom or his sister, Monica, who'd run and get the camera when a famous writer appeared so they could immortalise the moment. The answer is that the collection, which includes portraits of Liam O'Flaherty, Roald Dahl and Allen Ginsberg, will move to the book warehouse at Liosbán industrial estate on the Tuam Road, Galway. The gallery that adjoins the bookshop is relocating to the city's docklands.
One of the quotes of the week has to be from 87-year-old matriarch Maureen Kenny (below), who is now retired, but whose attitude to the high-tech future of the operation is characteristically adventurous: "You have got to move with the times." Still, we'll miss the shop
Kavanagh closing
The closing date for entry to the 34th Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, now sponsored by KPMG, has been extended to October 10th. The prize, for a first unpublished collection of poems, is €2,500 for the winner, with €1,000 and €500 for the runners-up. The judges are Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan.
Details from The Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan.
Tel: 042-9378560; e-mail: infoatpkc@eircom.net. Entry forms
can be downloaded from www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com
Tractor novel pulls a prize
Anyone who has read Marina Lewycka's wonderful first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, often unsure whether to laugh or to cry, won't be surprised that this week it won the Saga Award for Wit and Humour in Contemporary Writing, worth £20,000. It's also a blow for those who take up writing late - Lewycka was a first novelist at the age of 59. Though it didn't make this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist, it was on the increasingly influential longlist and tells the tale of what happens when an elderly widower announces that he is remarrying a gold-digger from the Ukraine, who is half his age and determined to live life to the full in the consumer's heaven that is England. Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the second World War, and grew up in England.
Collins-Churchill links
Writer Mary Kenny will give a talk at the National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin, at 7.30pm next Thursday on the relationship between Michael Collins and Winston Churchill. It is based on her play, Allegiance, a dramatised account of the evening before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 when Collins and Churchill met each other. Admission is free.