Celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Keohane's Bookshop in Sligo started this week with a reading by Dermot Healy from his new novel, Sudden Times.
Over the coming year a range of events, including "meet-the-author" evenings, a children's poetry competition and an adult short story competition, will be held at Keohane's three shops in Sligo, Ballina and Galway. For visual artists, it is also planned to have a portrait painting competition of authors in Sligo, Mayo and Galway.
A family business, Keohane's Bookshop was opened in Sligo in August 1949 by John Keohane. He had bought a newsagent's shop and opened on a Monday with just 15 books.
"They were Penguin paperbacks and I remember arranging them on a shelf, like soldiers standing side by side," Mr Keohane recalls. By Thursday, all 15 books were sold and he put in an order to Penguin.
A couple of months later, a representative from Penguin came to the shop to meet him, the first time anybody from the company had visited the west of Ireland.
There are now 32 employees in the three shops and John's son, Michael, runs the one in Sligo. Other family members run the Ballina and Galway shops. Expansion is continuing, as a new shop will be opening shortly in the Institute of Technology in Sligo.
To mark the anniversary, a commemorative book will be published. It will contain some specially commissioned pieces by west of Ireland authors and memorabilia relating to all things literary collected by John Keohane over the years.
Selling books is not always straightforward, says Michael Keohane. For a time people complained repeatedly about Ulysses being on sale in the shop, and the biggest seller of his 30-plus years in the business was the new Mass Book in the early 1970s.