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As an avid reader as a child, there were definitely perks to growing up with a family bookshop for Frank O’Mahony.
“We were actually allowed to take a book from the shop and read it, so long as it came back in pristine condition,” he recalls.
But?
“If there was the slightest mark or the spine was bent, we would have to pay full price for the book. So, we learned very quickly how to treat books properly!” he laughs.
And as the third generation at the helm of O’Mahony’s in Limerick- which is celebrating 120 years at 120 O’Connell St- Frank has not lost his love of books; or his commitment to the next generation of readers.
History
The flagship shop was established in 1902 by Frank’s grandfather, JP, who had been manager of the haberdashery in Cannock’s Department Store. A vacancy came up for the general manager role; but while he applied, he didn’t get it.
“The family saga is that he left in a fit of pique and opened up a shop about 150 yards away on O’Connell St, selling books and leather goods,” continues Frank.
His own father, also Frank, joined the family business after school. At that time, he would travel to the UK to purchase books directly from publishers; but it was a well-oiled system, even if a century ago. “He’d arrive over there on a Monday morning, this would be in the 1920s,” says Frank, “and the books that he ordered on the Monday would actually have arrived back to Ireland to the shop before he arrived home the following Monday. So, deliveries were much better then than they are now!”
Some of Frank’s earliest memories of the shop range from covering books for libraries to helping to sell Christmas cards; which was a lot more stressful than it sounds, as there were no box sets back then.
“They used to all be singles in those days,” he explains. “You’d have about 30 different size envelopes to match with the cards and you’d have people four deep all around!”
The shop, however, was a treasure trove for a young bookworm.
“The one thing I really remember having – and it’s probably really dating me – was a set of children’s encyclopedias,” he says, while also name-checking Agatha Christie (Murder On The Orient Express) and Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone) as favoured authors through his teens.
After school, Frank studied economics and politics in UCD, before returning to the family business in 1973. Today, O’Mahony’s stretches 16,000ft2 over three floors, while there are also branches in Tralee and Ennis and shops at the University of Limerick and NUI Galway, with up to 120 staff employed at peak times.
200,000 books in stock
As well as catering for the general reader, O’Mahony’s also supplies school books and libraries. For instance, it has the contract to supply non-fiction to every public library in the country. They also have a thriving online business, having upgraded their website during COVID.
“The minimum stock that we would have would be 200,000 books,” replies Frank when asked for an idea of the range on offer.
As for the biggest changes in the industry, Frank believes the game-changer was the introduction of tele-ordering.
“When I came in first, we used to deal with about 1,000 publishers,” he says.
“Really in the last 15 years, there have been a huge number of amalgamations and takeovers, so now the book trade is dominated by about four large publishing groups. But we used to have 1,000 different publishers and you would communicate with them by post. You would send orders by post every single day to them in individual envelopes, so you had massive post and it was a very slow way of doing things.”
Tele-ordering, however, meant “suddenly you could have your orders in the publishers’ warehouses the next day”.
Over the years, O’Mahony’s has hosted many high-profile authors for book-signings; though perhaps it’s no surprise that in Limerick, rugby stars attract the longest queues. But there have been other standout moments.
“Angela’s Ashes would have been very major for us,” recalls Frank. “The Limerick launch that we had for that when Frank [McCourt], Malachy [McCourt] and his two other brothers came, that was an absolutely incredible night and people queued for hours to get signed.”
Frank believes that during the COVID-19 pandemic people “turned some of their online purchasing away from Amazon and towards local bookshops”.
When it comes to competing with that international juggernaut, however, he says the key is providing a high-quality, fast and yet personal service.
“Eighty per cent of [online] orders we receive are dispatched the same day that we get the order and 95% are dispatched either the same day or next day,” he says, “and people can pick up the phone and ring us if they have the slightest problem.”
Future for books
Frank does worry that older students have become too reliant on the internet for getting information and “miss the broadness that you can get by having a textbook open in front of you”. But he is heartened that book sales have gone up in Ireland and the UK over the last two years, and believes that parents “are very aware of the value of reading to their children”.
“And if you ask any teachers, they will tell you straight away that they know the people that have read books and as an employer, we would notice it,” he says.
As for this year’s Christmas best-sellers, while international fiction writers like Lee Child, John Grisham and Patricia Cornwall will always perform, Frank says “Irish books do sell particularly well at Christmas”, with big interest in An Irish Folklore Treasury by John Creedon, Time and Tide by Charlie Bird, Never Better by Tommie Gorman, Limerick: A Biography in Nine Lives by Arthur James O’Dea and The Road To Riverdance by Bill Whelan.
Frank himself often has a few books on the go, but over Christmas is looking forward to reading Quinn by Trevor Birney and The Book of the Skelligs by John Crowley and John Sheehan.
As for 2023, Frank’s daughter Claire – who is currently in Australia – will be returning to work in the business, as will his son Stephen, who has been working with a charity in Honduras for the last seven years.
So, with the fourth generation taking the reins, will that mean more time for reading for Frank? “Oh, plenty of reading!” he laughs.
Visit www.omahonys.ie
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