THE afterglow of a leisurely browse frequently lingers long after a bookshop visit. But over the summer that pleasure has been snuffed out in two of Ireland’s longest established bookshops.
Keohane’s in Sligo, with nearly 65 years in the bookselling business, closed due to the recession, while in Belfast – after 52 years – the Bookshop at Queen’s held the final day of its closing down sale on August 20th. Its demise is blamed on competition from internet sales which over the last five years has fundamentally changed the culture of learning.
Small independent bookshops are having a particularly tough time. Not only do they have to compete with the behemoth chains as well as internet and supermarket bookselling, but also with customers increasingly buying e-books, never mind rising rents.
The strength of these two much-loved shops was that out-of-print treasures could turn up unexpectedly in both of them. Some of my finds in Keohane’s over the years included WB Yeats ephemera, rare editions from the Cuala Press and scarce local history reviews. Founded by John Keohane in 1947 the shop was a mecca for bibliophiles and was synonymous with Sligo. He built its reputation on personal service and had first-hand knowledge of the stock, a tradition continued by his son Michael who pointed customers to a specific title or highlighted a particular passage in a book in a way that is not possible with the click of a mouse.
With its distinctive bright red frontage, Keohane’s in Castle Street was a welcoming place and a literary landmark. Tourists calling at the shop were often recommended a good read and were then given detailed directions on how to get to locations on the Yeats trail.
Although it had a different personality, the Queen’s bookshop served the needs of thousands of students and had a general appeal. It started in humble beginnings in a house on University Road in 1958 selling only textbooks and in 1972 expanded and moved to University Terrace where it remained until the end.
Apart from the academic side, the shop embraced everything from Penguin “black classics”, books on Irish history, politics and poetry, literary journals, and an extensive Beat Generation section featuring work by luminaries such as Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. Crucially it also supported small presses and promoted the work of local authors.
The shop was a shared space and offered a platform for many different viewpoints. At book launches, political and paramilitary opponents frequently bumped into each other for a generally amiable but occasionally frank exchange. A highlight for regulars was the annual New Year sale in January; 20 years ago book lovers queued all night to snap up a literary bargain.
Farther afield the Travel Bookshop in London's Notting Hill became another casualty closing at the end of August after 32 years of equipping travellers with a precious vade mecumor the latest Dervla Murphy, Jan Morris or Colin Thubron. It was also used as the venue for Hugh Grant's shop in his film Notting Hillwhich starred Julia Roberts.
While reorganising my own collection during the summer, I revisited some books on my shelves that had not been opened for several years. I came across a slightly foxed first edition of A Time of Giftsby Patrick Leigh Fermor, bought in the Travel Bookshop (£6.50 net) three years after it was published in 1977. Leigh Fermor, who died in June aged 96, wrote in a picaresque style with voluptuous prose. His book, based on a walk across Europe in 1934 when he was a teenager, took him from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He planned to live "like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar". The book comes under the term "intergenerational collaboration" ie the journey seen through the eyes of an 18-year-old and the book written more than 40 years later with the hindsight of a 62-year-old – what is known in writerly circles as having a long gestation.
A small errata slip listing six corrections fell out of my book. One example, to illustrate the joy of typos, will suffice: P208, line 6: for “ghastly” read “ghostly”. The author is describing the view across Vienna towards Czechoslovakia and the line of the Little Carpathians “. . . just as the sun was beginning to set, we came on a tarn in a ghastly wood of rime-feathered saplings as two-dimensional and brittle-seeming as white ferns”. Few books these days carry errata slips and who can predict what the 21st century equivalent downloaded on to a digital tablet will be. Although it is possible to buy almost any book on the internet (reader reviews of Leigh Fermor’s works on Amazon show him being rediscovered) we are still much the poorer for the loss of the shops, the chance encounters made on lovingly stacked shelves, and the personal recommendation from someone with passion for the printed word. Sadly in the harsh retail bookselling world, business longevity counts for nothing.
Nonetheless the tactile delight of handling books still remains, and for some the feel-good factor of a bookshop will never be replaced. The pleasure of drooling over rarities, admiring the endpapers, binding and gilt edging, and if the spirit moves you, smelling the print or sniffing the paper, are sensory experiences that a computer or e-reader cannot offer. And inevitably it ends in the best serendipitous book-buying tradition, leaving the shop with a bag of happy purchases that you didn’t know you needed.