Anyone who has ever browsed round Kenny's Bookshop in Galway will have spent at least part of their time there looking not at books, but at photographs of people who have written books. For many years now, writers who have had book-signings at the shop - or simply been spied in passing - have had their picture taken, and been invited to sign the card with which the photo will be framed. A selection of these photographs - too informal to be called portraits - has been published in Face to Face, with a foreword by Fintan O'Toole.
Here are Brian Friel, Roald Dahl, Eavan Boland, Richard Ford, Mary O'Malley, P.D.James, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, Tom Murphy, James Ryan, Dermot Bolger, Katie Donovan, Paul Muldoon, Tim Robinson and Dervla Murphy. Here, also, is a record of those who have departed forever: Brian Moore, Mary Lavin, Bryan MacMahon, Catherine Winton (Lady Gregory's grand-daughter), Francis Stuart, Allen Ginsberg, Walter Macken, George MacBeth, Sean Dunne and Jim Kemmy.
However, this book is more of a curiosity than anything else. The photographs are not technically outstanding - really belonging in the snaps category - nor do they contribute anything fresh about their subjects. Studied away from the context of the bookshop for which they were taken, they lose much of their charm. You'd be better off going to look at the originals, which can still be seen all over Kenny's.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist
