Bookseller's best-selling family saga

Trade NamesIt's a tale that spans three generations, censorship, punishing VAT, blockbuster hype - and reps in hats and ties.Rose Doyle meets a Limerick bookseller

Frank O'Mahony knows more than most about books and bookselling. He's had more opportunity to learn than most too - the O'Mahony's have been selling books at 120 O'Connell Street, Limerick, since 1902. More than a landmark, and certainly more than an institution, O'Mahony's is to that city's main street what cream is to coffee: tasty, addictive and appreciated.

From the outside an elegant sweep of curved window indicates serious bookselling to come. Inside, three floors of books are cunningly sectioned into floors within floors, browsing corners and library-like rooms. An infinity of books, it seems like, spread over 177 sq m (16,500 sq ft) in architect Eamonn Matthews' 1997 RIAI award-winning redesigned building.

Time was when O'Mahony's covered a modest 41 sq m (450 sq ft), "just the front of a Georgian building" as Frank O'Mahony, today's managing director, puts it. He tells the O'Mahony bookselling story with the sort of care and attention to detail he puts into running the business.

"The business was founded in 1902 by my grandfather, John Patrick (JP) O'Mahony," he says. "He paid £500 key money for 120 O'Connell Street. The Nash Estate owned half the central city at that stage and we paid £1 a week rent until we bought out the freehold in the mid-1970s."

JP O'Mahony was from Cork and married the niece of MJ Clery of Clerys and Arnotts in Dublin.

JP was a department manager in Cannocks of Limerick when Clery sold Arnotts and acquired that Limerick shop. When JP wasn't given the promotion he expected he promptly left and set up O'Mahonys. "His friends didn't believe he'd last," Frank says.

The original bookshop sold the ubiquitous fancy goods, pictures, picture frames as well as books. Frank O'Mahony's father, Frank Edward O'Mahony, who was born in 1898, took over the business when his father JP died in 1931.

Frank describes him as "formidable, with a quiet manner, a great businessman and still the MD when he died in 1979. Everything he had went into the shop and he took a fiendish delight in expanding against the advice of the bank and accountants. He once barred one of the city's better known surgeons for being rude to staff."

FE O'Mahony's first wife died in 1926. In 1949 he married again and Frank is the second of six children born to him and his second wife, Clare. "I came into the business in 1973," Frank explains, "after doing economics and politics in UCD. My younger brother, David, did business studies in NIHE, as it then was, and joined me in 1977. We ran the business together until last year when I bought out David, who wanted to move in a slightly different direction. My mother Clare is still actively involved."

FE O'Mahony lived over the shop until 1935 when he moved to Fort Mary on the North Circular Road, the large house in which he would rear his large family. Frank remembers it as a home filled with books. What he doesn't actually remember about early times in the business, he's heard about over the years.

"Things were far more personal in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s," he says. "My father, for instance, was a good friend of Allen Lane of Penguin books and was the first person in Ireland to buy paperbacks from him after the war. Willie Gill (father of Michael Gill of Gill & Macmillan) was a great friend of his and so was Allen Figgis."

He tells how Dan Doyle, the first librarian appointed to Limerick County Council, came to his father in 1937 and asked how he could buy and have books delivered from the UK. Frank senior placed an order, had it delivered in five days and started an aspect of the business which, Frank says, has O'Mahony's supplying libraries "the length and breath of the country to this day. We're also one of the biggest school suppliers in the country."

In the early days of the shop Frank E O'Mahony would visit publishers in London to buy books. "A lot of what he bought on Monday and Tuesday would be waiting for him on his return at the end of the week." Frank is rueful: "When I came in the 1970s, four weeks was the standard time for deliveries. Things improved in the 1980s and by the 1990s delivery times were down to a week. A lot had to do with the size of publishers, which were smaller and more individual in the l970s."

In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, classic literature was a popular seller. "A very Catholic ethos prevailed and we sold a lot of religious books. There was nothing like the volume of books available there is now," Frank says. "That change came in the 1970s when mass market publishing began and there was more spending money about.

"Censorship stopped being an issue in the 1970s too. Covers became bolder and I remember, when Fontana produced a tasteful Simone de Beauvoir cover of a woman without clothes, how we'd find it turned face-in on the shelves. The same with Edna O'Brien books.

"Bookselling was still a gentlemanly business then too - reps would come over from the UK wearing hats and ties! In the 1980s, the mass market launched Barbara Taylor-Bradford, Jilly Cooper and Frederick Forsyth. Everything changed when UK publishers began to be subsumed into larger groups."

The late 1970s break with sterling was hard on booksellers. Together with VAT it increased the price of books by 60 per cent over two years.The Booksellers Association, with Frank O'Mahony as its chairman, ran a successful campaign to have VAT removed from books. Booksellers and publishers then pledged £30,000 in a further campaign to get book-buyers back into the shops. "We could do it then," Frank says, "because we weren't dealing with multinationals."

There was a point when the O'Mahony bookselling story might have changed direction. The UK bookseller Pentos, which had bought out Hodges Figgis around 1980, offered it to O'Mahony's when they themselves later went bust.

"I could have bought HF for £70,000, the cost of their stock in fact," Frank says, "but I decided against buying. It would have meant a move to Dublin and I was keen to carry out expansion here."

The O'Mahony expansion story charts a course through the changing 20th century. The first ground floor expansion happened in 1946 and the second, a basement extension in 1953, was overseen by Clare O'Mahony and Arthur O'Leary, the shop's manager for some 40 years. (FE O'Mahony was in hospital at the time.) In 1970, a library supply department was added to the first floor and in 1976 the schoolbook department was moved round the corner to Thomas Street.

Between 1978 and 1980 the main shop floor was extended from 278 sq m to 600 sq m (3,000 sq ft to 6,500 sq ft).

In the 1990s, O'Mahony's opened shops in Tralee and Ennis and in the middle of that decade extended the O'Connell Street shop to 1,021 sq m (11,000sq ft). Four years ago the company acquired the rear of the next door premises. O'Mahonys also has a shop in the University of Limerick.

Frank laments some changes in bookselling, things like "the lack of care by publishers to seriously good authors' backlists and marketing pressures which shorten the shelf-life of books and creates bestsellers, some worthy, some not, but all of them hyped a lot.

"We've some customers who've been coming for over 80 years and Frank McCourt tells the story of how he was thrown out after four days reading Macbeth in his lunchtime. We gave him a leather bound copy when his own book was published."

O'Mahony's employ more than 100 people, up to 150 at peak seasonal times. Frank is there for the long haul. "I'm a 100 per cent owner now," he says, "and it's up to my children whether they'll come into the business or not. I won't be forcing them.

"I'm a firm believer in keeping control in the hands of only one or two family members. My eldest is only 17 and youngest eight, so there's a while to go yet before decisions are made."