Greene's - a bookshop with a story to tell

Fashionable as the Millenium Wing of the National Gallery may have made the TCD end of Clare Street, it will never have the cachet Greene's Bookshop gives the Merrion Square end.

This is to compare chalk with cheese, of course, because Greene's is low on the grandeur scale and the only queues it ever attracts are students and frazzled parents with school booklists in hand.

What Greene's has by the shelf-ful is a past, an atmosphere and a story to tell. Not that Greene's does much to proclaim itself; the term low-key might have been invented with the shop, and its owners, in mind. It also has all the quiet peace and dogged eccentricity of a real bookshop.

For years the favoured browse of the late greats of literature, religion and politics, you'll find today's practitioners coming and going too. New and secondhand books have been sold on two floors of 16 Clare Street since 1843, when it was set up by John Greene as a lending library.

Before that it was the place to go in Dublin for ladies' hosiery and before that, when it was built in the late 1700s, it was the four-storey over basement home and workplace to the original owners.

In 1892, a family called Quinn took over and in 1912, one Herbert Heymour Pembrey arrived, from Oxford via Combridge's bookshop in Grafton Street, to become the new owner.

H.H. Pembrey's s family still own and run Greene's Bookshop. Today's owner/manager is Herbert's great-grandson, David. The proud father of a six-month-old boy, he's gently hopeful the tradition of first-born sons going into the business will continue. The women in the family have not, he says, tended to go into bookselling. He and his mother are the directors of the present-day company. His brother and two sisters have chosen not to become involved.

When H H Pembrey died in the l940s, his son Herbert Seymour, who had joined the company in 1928, took over. Herbert Seymour's son, Eric Joseph (David's father) came into the business in l954. Herbert Seymour died in March 1988 and Eric Joseph Pembrey died in October 2000.

Eric Joseph believed that keeping up an old world image - and keeping the computer system well out of sight - was an integral part of the Greene marketing strategy. The family business ethos is based on the principle of working on a fair percentage, resisting the temptation to "make a fast buck".

The Greene's building is Grade 2 Listed and the distinctive glass canopy to the front was put there in l917. The book-filled wooden tables, outside winter and summer, look as if they were put there at the same time but are actually a bit younger. It's all painted green - what else - and the letttering is the same as it was 159 years ago.

Greene's lending library activities ceased in l958 and these days (in response to demand) you can buy newspapers and sweets on the ground floor as well as new books and school books. There has been a sub-post office on this floor too since l886.

The basement as well as the second and third storeys are used for storage and a wide and winding 100-years plus stairs leads to the second-hand books on the first floor. This is where founder John Greene was laid out when he died in l899. It's also where staff fried breakfasts over an open fire in the l940s.

Notable and familiar features include the great mirror at the turn on the stairs as well as reasonably intact ceiling roses and plasterwork. A trio of cast-iron fireplaces are barely visible behind the shelves of books, floorboards are hollowed by the years and three sash windows with shutters look out over Clare Street and the building which housed the offices where Samuel Beckett's father earned a living. (Beckett father and son bought their books in Greene's.)

A quick browse on this floor reveals gems as diverse as a 1921 eight-volume Commentary on Canon Law, an 1840 edition of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica Minuta, an early 1900s edition of The Poetical Works of Wordsworth - with original engravings and steel portrait - and Jack Charlton's biography from 1996.

David Pembrey is happy with his piece of the world and works all year round. He took a week off last year when his son Eric was born and another at the end of the summer.

He's happy to have Greene's go on as it is, unchanged. The newspapers and sweets happened because a nearby newsagent's shop closed and regulars kept asking him to fill the gap. You sense he did it to more to oblige than because of any perception that it might be a smart business move.

A bit like his by-the-way admission that the Millenium Wing has brought "some extra passing trade" and his aside about "the famous ones who came here, Kavanagh and Behan and all that lot, as well as the Yeatses, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor and Mary Lavin." They and others came for years to Greenes, it being the sort of place both customers and staff are loyal to. David Penbrey has10 full-time employees as well as four part-timers - "men and women, a good mix".

Which brings him to Miss Rochford, "The Roch" as she was known in the shop. She came to work in Greene's when she was 16 and was still working there, six days a week, in the l980s, when she was in her 80s, mostly on the first floor where "climbing ladders and shelving was no bother to her" according to David Pembery. She dozed off and died one Saturday going home on the bus. "She knew everyone," says David.

He looks around, happy with the way things are. "I've never done anything else," he admits, "and I'm not about to change. This keeps me occupied. "Business, he assures me in his low-key way, "is fine. Ticking over".