Books Are My Business: Conor Kenny, Kenny's Bookshop, Galway
Conor Kenny of Kennys Bookshop
I’m 66 and I’m 50 years in the books business — I began working in the business straight away when I came out of school. It has been wonderful but there have been plenty of tough times. This business is supporting a number of families — and five of our own family, three brothers, one sister and myself. We have seen all of the recessions and all of the rest of it but we adapted and that is the reason we ended up doing the rare book collections and archives. During Covid, our website became an overnight success online after 20 years. We have kept a lot of that business.
It started when we began doing business in the US in 1986 during the major recession. It was an effort to save the business — we did it on a wing and a prayer, with the help of the Irish Trade Board. We started visiting American libraries and asking them what did they want. Most of them wanted new books but a lot of them started asking us about collections, subject-specific ones like pamphlets from the North. We responded to that and over the years we have become one of the major dealers in both archives and special collections, as opposed to antiquarian material.
I go and see the client first, assess the situation, bring the material to Galway, assess it again, pass it on to our cataloguer who is a trained archivist, she then produces the text, the material is photographed and a catalogue created.
It is not big but there is a market — it depends on the material, the collection and subject matter. We have sold everything from Irish archives to Persian manuscript collections for serious money. At the moment, we are working on a Jewish collection in Toronto, which is a massive collection of manuscripts, documents and books. I am also working on Beckett material which we acquired ourselves recently. We have worked in China, Japan and Australia but the main market comprises the major institutions in Ireland, the UK and the US — they trust us which is the most important thing.
There have been plenty. One of the highlights was selling the John Moore collection of Bram Stoker material which is probably the best collection in the world [it was acquired by Emory University in the US in 2021]. It doesn’t matter what the collection is — you are dealing with the person so you become involved immediately. Another thing is that in relation to literary archives, the actual manuscripts aren’t as interesting as the correspondence. In some cases, there can be correspondence with another poet or writer which in itself is hugely significant.
We have advocated poets, writers and artists for years — they stand up better than any group. And it is continuing — mná na hÉireann are coming forward at a phenomenal rate, it’s wonderful.
The variety and challenge — when you are acquiring material, you have to be reasonably confident that you are going to sell it at some point in time. And building relationships, both with the clients and the writers. One of the challenges we are rising to as well is that of digital archiving. We treat digital exactly the same as we do a piece of paper. It is about the significance and importance of the content. The message to all budding writers is save what you do every day — everything.
Patrick Kavanagh’s . by JJ Lee. Fintan O’Toole’s yet to be published biography of Seamus Heaney, accompanied by his 100 poems.
