Greene's bookshop had already notched up more than half a century of business in Dublin when Herbert Seymour (Bertie) Pembrey was born on November 6th, 1908.
In fact it opened way back in the summer of 1843, some time before Daniel O'Connell left home on nearby Merrion Square to address the monster meeting of his repeal movement in Tara. To this day the shop bears the name of the man who opened it, John Greene, and a sign on the listed frontage still betrays its origins as a lending library; but for most of the 20th century, Greene's has been owned by the Pembrey family.
Bertie Pembrey's father, also christened Herbert, bought the business in 1912. He was from Oxford, but moved to Dublin in 1892 to work in Combridge's bookshop, which used to occupy the corner next to the old Brown Thomas store on Grafton St.
In 1902 he married Beatrice Eagle, also from Oxford, and the couple had four young children by the time they moved from Rathmines to live over the new business on Clare St. The family soon moved to Rush in north Co Dublin, where the young Bertie Pembrey began a lifelong love of rugby and cricket, playing in nearby Malahide.
When his older brother, Jack, developed an aversion to the book trade and opted for banking instead, Bertie Pembrey's life course was set; and after a secondary schooling in Wesley and a course in shorthand, typing and accounts, he moved into Greene's in 1928.
Born a Protestant, he took his wife's religion when he married Leona Farrell, from Balbriggan, in 1934.
It was an unusual step, particularly since family members recall his father as a "stalwart Protestant, and quite high up in the Freemasons". But Herbert Pembrey raised no objection to his son's decision, encouraging him to do what he felt was right; and Bertie Pembrey embraced Catholicism with a fervour that lasted the rest of his life.
He was on "every possible committee" in the parish in Booterstown, where the couple first lived; was for 19 years president of the local branch of St Vincent de Paul, and later became the first minister of the Eucharist when the practice was introduced in the local church.
Meanwhile Greene's was a thriving business and, as the shelves and floorboards continued to acquire the patina of a relic of old Dublin, Bertie Pembrey never lost his business acumen.
He finally shed the lending library aspect of the business around 1952, to concentrate on the sale of new and second-hand books; and was wont to caution that a bookseller could not be a collector; "otherwise he dies of starvation".
Even so, in a business populated by eccentrics, a British antiquarian writing about bookshops in these islands found his "the most harmonious personality of any bookseller I know".
While many Dubliners were happy to browse in the cheapbook stalls outside the shop - always a feature of Greene's - much of literary Dublin passed through its doors over the years. In an RTE radio documentary in 1995, Still Greene's After All These Years, Bertie Pembrey recalled a "very shy" Samuel Beckett borrowing and buying books. Frank O'Connor, who loved detective novels, was another regular; as was Brendan Behan, who on one memorable occasion dropped in to thank the proprietor for promoting his work.
"I believe yez had me in the window," Behan said. This was true, although the promotion had been inspired by the imminent banning of Borstal Boy and the need to offload all copies before the axe fell. Nonetheless grateful, Behan announced that the same "bowsie" who had banned him had evicted his family from their house before his birth. "He had two axes to grind there," Eric Pembrey - Bertie's son who now runs Greene's - told the documentary makers.
One of the unusual features of Greene's is that it also doubles as a sub post-office. It started out as a 19th century "receiving house" for letters, which would be collected by post office vans; but Herbert, Bertie and now Eric Pembrey have all enjoyed the position of sub-postmaster, useful in a business with a large mail order element.
A stroke suffered by Bertie Pembrey's wife in 1986, combined with the glaucoma which had deprived her of most of her eyesight, precipitated his retirement after half a century in the job; although a week before his death he insisted he had never really retired. "In his mind he was still there," a family member says.
When Leona Pembrey died in April 1998, he sold the house in Blackrock and moved into a nursing home. He was "very happy and very placid" to the end, chatting about the revived fortunes of the Irish rugby team and surrounded by his family before he died aged 91, on March 4th.
Bertie Pembrey is survived by his sons Eric and Vivian, and daughters Olivia, Loli (Dolores) and Eleanor.
Herbert Seymour (Bertie) Pembrey: born 1908; died March, 2000