The Accidental Publisher

MICHAEL O’BRIEN

THE ACCIDENTAL PUBLISHER

FRAGMENTS OF A MEMOIR

4 July 1941 – 31 July 2022

THE ACCIDENTAL PUBLISHER

FRAGMENTS OF A MEMOIR

MICHAEL

O’BRIEN

First published 2024 by The O’Brien Press Ltd, 12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, D06 HD27, Ireland.

Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777

E-mail: books@obrien.ie. Website: obrien.ie

The O’Brien Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

ISBN: 978-1-78849-527-1

Text © Michael O’Brien and The O’Brien Press 2024

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Editing, typesetting, layout, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd

Cover and inside design by Emma Byrne.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including for text and data mining, training arti cial intelligence systems, photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The author and publisher thank the following for permission to use photographs and illustrative material:

Photographs: The majority of photographs are reproduced from The O’Brien Press archives and the O’Brien family archives. Other images are credited to: p.43 Stephen Conlin; p.54 (bottom) Ian Broad; p.203 (top) Richard Mills. If any involuntary infringement of copyright has occurred, sincere apologies are o ered, and the owners of such copyright are requested to contact the publisher.

Printed and bound in Ireland by Sprint Books.

The paper in this book is produced using pulp from managed forests.

A Note on Fragmented Memories page 7

Why is Book? 9

Chapter 1: Family Background, Childhood, Youth12

Chapter 2: An Accidental Publisher 41

Chapter 3: e Early Years of e O’Brien Press51

Chapter 4: Changing Technology 68

Chapter 5: Wood Quay 76

Chapter 6: In Search of an International Market99

Chapter 7: Children’s Books – A New Direction117

Chapter 8: Personal Favourites and Landmark Books 140

A Few Final Words – Un nished oughts190

Afterword – Ivan O’Brien 192

A Note on Fragmented Memories

This book marks the ftieth anniversary of the founding of e O’Brien Press in November 1974. e book was originally conceived as a memoir to be written by Michael O’Brien, joint founder of the company with his father, Tom. Michael asked me to work with him on it as I had been involved as editor at the company from 1982 to 2007 and subsequently worked on a daily basis with Michael for many years.

Michael began the book and dictated a good deal of material. He was helped at di erent times by several people to get the project underway. However, his sudden death in July 2022 meant that there was now no longer the possibility of a complete memoir. It existed in fragments in many places. Sadly, we had only just begun the task of getting the nal book assembled and written.

e O’Brien Press directors Ivan O’Brien and Kunak McGann and I came to the conclusion that though these fragments regrettably could not be a full exploration of all the themes, events and issues of Michael’s life and work, there were still interesting

memories and musings already recorded that could represent many of his core beliefs and could tell the story of the birth and development of an independent Irish publishing house at a signi cant historical moment in Irish publishing. Despite the fact that the project had been cut short far too early in its development, and that there were huge gaps, we felt this book might be a tting celebratory publication for the ftieth anniversary of the company.

e fragments we have here are very much in Michael’s own words, words he would no doubt have honed and expanded (and in some cases double-checked), had time allowed.

ey are primarily memories of the early years of the press and thoughts on favourite or signi cant projects. ey re ect on Michael’s family background, his formative years, his core values, his business approach, and his experience as founder of e O’Brien Press in 1974.

Ide ní Laoghaire

Editorial Director, e O’Brien Press

1982–2007

Why This Book?

Quite a few years ago I was asked by another publisher to write my memoirs. I wondered why. Why would anyone be interested? It was pointed out to me that my life was interwoven with the emergence of the publishing industry in Ireland, and that I was one person who had actually lived that experience and knew all the details involved. So, I gave it some thought. I tried to write it – but I am not a writer and prefer to spend my personal time painting or gardening or reading art books. is activity didn’t suit me at all, so I gave up. I cancelled the contract. e project then sat there, abandoned.

Until one day a group of O’Brien Press sta were talking about our forthcoming ftieth anniversary in 2024 – the company had been set up in 1974 – and someone said: what about those memoirs? Would they be tting at that time? I gave the suggestion some further thought.

In the end, I persuaded a few people to come on board to assist in the writing. It would not really be a personal memoir as I don’t believe that that is relevant to anyone apart from me and my family; it would be more an account of my life as a publisher – what that was about and how it all evolved, and how I saw it and experienced

it. Some family details would help shape an approach to publishing, so I would include them.

e O’Brien Press has published over 2,000 books in its fty years, and currently has nearly 700 on its list. You could not possibly tell the story of all those books, interesting though some of those stories are. I had to select. As I began to write, I tried to pick out those books that represent stages in our development – as a country and as an industry, as well as a company – and I managed to squeeze in a few of my own personal favourites too. Personal favourites are what keep a publisher going, after all.

e year 1974 is roughly fty years after Ireland’s independence. I thought how tting to look back now, another fty years later, and recall how the indigenous Irish book publishing industry came about. Publishing seems to be a late developer in a postcolonial situation; in the 1970s, the market was still dominated by products from the original empire, though ironically many interesting, groundbreaking and successful authors often come from dominated countries. Perhaps a dominated people has more to say than those who are comfortable with the status quo.

In the decades just before the birth of e O’Brien Press, the Catholic Church continued to dominate moral and welfare issues in Ireland, in particular matters such as marriage, divorce, abortion and the school system. As the twentieth century progressed, the power of the Church began to fall away, and a freer, more democratic society emerged; this was to prove a fertile publishing environment.

I rmly believe it is important for every country to have its own publishing industry. ere are events that are of huge importance to that country but to nobody else; there is the question of the ‘take’ on many situations – the voice of a people expressed on

major and minor issues. It is important that smaller countries have their say and that colonised countries make space for their own point of view and do not continue to rely on the opinion of the former dominant country. All of this means that a healthy publishing industry is vital, providing an independent platform for a nation. Creating this possibility, with all its challenges, has been an interesting journey. It feels like a hectic fty years.

Four large multinational publishing groups have o ered to buy e O’Brien Press. I have always said no. I feel that the main motivation of such companies is to get rid of the competition. I expect and hope that my family and team will continue with this independence.

Michael O’Brien

Family Background, Childhood, Youth

Icome from an unusual mix of backgrounds for Ireland of the 1940s: my father was a communist, from a Catholic family, and my mother was Jewish, from an immigrant Russian-Jewish family. ey met at Dublin’s New eatre Group, set up as a workers’ theatre in 1937 to explore radical political views. eir plays were put on at the Peacock eatre and in various trade-union halls. My parents’ shared interests at the time were theatre, literature and opposition to the rise of fascism. ey wanted to help bring about a fair and democratic socialist society.

FATHER

My father, Tom, was born on 21 April 1914. e family had a ne house in Phibsboro and a shop at 14a Phibsboro Road. He was one of seven children – two boys, who both became left-wing radical

activists, and ve sisters, all conservative Catholics. e family circumstances are a bit of a mystery. When the last two sisters, Mona and Lucy, died, they left behind a strange mix of squalor and elegance: a beautiful clavichord, handmade chairs, tables and mirrors, alongside junk, disorder and a plethora of holy pictures. It appeared as if the family had come down in the world.

My father had the usual Irish Catholic childhood of that era until his older brother Jamesbecame interested in left-wing politics and Tom then went on to follow in his older brother’s footsteps. ese interests led to my father becoming a communist. In 1938 he joined the International Brigades and went with them to the Spanish Civil War, to do his bit to try to prevent the fascists, especially Hitler, taking over Europe. However, he never talked much about his earlier life, and most of what I know comes from

Michael O’Brien’s father, omas O’Brien.

discoveries after his death – often from documents found literally ‘under the bed’. I knew that he had left school at fourteen, as did many at that time, and that his political views had led to him joining the IRA in the early 1930s.

Many years later, in 1994, I was to discover more about my father when H. Gustav Klaus, a German academic, contacted me out of the blue from former East Germany, asking if I knew a poet called Tom O’Brien. He was researching socialist activities in 1930s Ireland and he was amazed when my mother showed him a case containing letters to my father in Spain, a collection of his poetry in progress, and a cowboy book and plays that he had written. A book about his life, Strong Words, Brave Deeds: e Poetry, Life and Times of omas O’Brien, Volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, was conceived, and was published by e O’Brien Press to mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the press and of his death. is biography of my father includes an account of his activities in Spain, extracts from correspondence during those years, articles for left-wing publications such as Workers’ Republic, along with some of his poetry (some of which had originally been published in anthologies in the 1930s); it also reproduces New eatre Group plays, and essays by socialist activists of the period.

My father was one of the Irish volunteers who went to Spain with the International Brigades. eir journey took them rst to London, then Paris, where they were lodged in small hotels by the French Communist Party, then by train to Languedoc, where they stayed in isolated farmhouses, then over the Pyrenees by foot, walking in the cold and the dark along smugglers’ pathways and

mountain ridges. A number of volunteers who had come earlier had already died in the con ict. Tom and his colleagues waited in villages near the river Ebro, which marked the front line. ‘Waiting, waiting, waiting’ was a strong theme in my father’s poetry about Spain. In 1994, I interviewed Eugene Downing, a fellow volunteer of my father in Spain. Downing was wounded during the war and had a foot amputated. He remembered:

‘Your father and I crossed the river together. We both had hung from our belts strings of hand grenades, a ri e and ammunition. If we fell over, we would drown, as the weight would keep us below water. Franco’s troops were ring across the river – colleagues and friends were struck and drowned. We both crossed successfully.’

I believe that my father was injured during this period because I remember asking him about a scar above his temple. He said it was a bullet from Spain.

I rely a lot on his poems to show me what he thought and felt. Here is a small taste of what he wrote about the Spanish Civil War:

I have written poems in words Now I shall write one in action I shall go and do the things I wrote and thought about.

From Strong Words, Brave Deeds

After ghting in Spain, he wrote many poems, including the following:

I will sing of men who died

In a land of black and white.

O, the white sun, the white still standing sun

And the black still standing shadow

And the split dry mouth of earth

All hot and panting hot

All panting hot and all unblinking.

Sun faced the earth unblinking

Unblinking earth faced back,

Heat stilled, heat held, heat spelled,

Man and the beetle moved

From crack of earth to crack

And under leaf, man moved …

International Brigade Dead

A lonely student in a silent room

Quits his lagging pen to dream

Of thundering mountains;

From Strong Words, Brave Deeds

Crouches, tight-faced, where the vine-stump

Spreads its silent singing leaves,

Still eyes where the lifting dust

Speaks of death;

Leaps from vine to covering vine

To the mound of safety;

Dies, as fancy has it,

Gladly on the sun’s bright theatre …

From Strong Words, Brave Deeds

O’BRIEN’S LIBRARY

Both before and after his period in Spain, my father struggled with stretches of unemployment. In his earlier years he had unusual ways of earning money. One of his enterprises was O’Brien’s Library, which I only became aware of after his death when my mother o ered me a gift from my father’s book collection. Looking through the bookcases, I noticed that a few books were neatly covered in brown paper. I pulled down three of them and was amazed to see them stamped inside with: O’Brien’s Best Book Library –Books at your Doorstep, 14a Phibsboro, Dublin. is was the address of the shop where my aunts, my father’s sisters, lived at this stage in their lives. It was the original family home, a ne Victorian

From left: Michael O’Brien, his sister Miriam and brother Brendan and (front) their mother, Ann, on the publication of Strong Words, Brave Deeds.

brick and granite house, but by the time my extended family and I inherited it, it was in a dreadfully run-down condition and couldn’t be rescued so we were forced to sell it to a builder.

I remember asking my mother, ‘What is this O’Brien’s Library?’ and she answered in an o hand way, ‘Oh your dad ran a little library, it wasn’t much.’ She looked embarrassed, but I decided to nd out more. e books I had pulled from the shelves were a Graham Greene novel and My Struggle by Adolf Hitler – a 1939 English translation of Mein Kampf (1933). I learned later that my father believed it was important for readers to know the evil plans of Hitler. ere was also Tess of the D’Urbervilles by omas Hardy.

Around the same time, on a visit to the Phibsboro house to meet up with my aunts Mona and Lucy, I noticed a wooden trailer with

Michael O’Brien with his mother, Ann, and Gustav Klaus (far right), author of the omas O’Brien biography, Strong Words, Brave Deeds. In the foreground, the O’Brien wooden library cart is just visible.

pram wheels and asked, ‘What is this?’ ‘Oh, nothing much,’ I was told. ‘Your father had a library.’ It transpired that this trailer was my father’s travelling library and he attached it to his bicycle to travel around making deliveries and collections. ‘What’s it used for now?’ I asked my aunts. ‘Collecting coal,’ they told me. So I asked if I could take it and I have it still.

While discovering more about my father’s interests and endeavours, I also found a small archive of the New eatre Group in the attic of one of the group’s founders. e papers were destined to be thrown out, so I had them digitised and the archive is now in my possession. It is a valuable archive of a small group of activists from the 1930s – with information about their aims, what they did, who else was in the group, and so on. ( is archive was donated to Maynooth University in 2023.)

E&T O’BRIEN

e 1940s saw my father back in Ireland, where he turned his attention to the printing industry.

e printing company

E&T O’Brien, where our publishing activities later began, was set up around 1948 by him and Elinor O’Brien. She was not related to our family but came from a wealthy O’Brien family

An example of an E&T O’Brien calendar. Calendars were key administrative tools for business during this era.

from the Shannon estuary area in Limerick and was descended from William Smith O’Brien, leader of the Young Irelanders, a political movement in the 1840s seeking independence. A talented photographer, botanist and an artist, her work is to be found in the National Library’s Photographic Archive and in the Irish Museum of Modern Art; she was also involved in a broad range of leftist activities, both cultural and political. At a time when the establishment was Catholic-led and conservative, Elinor was dedicated to promoting the cause of socialism and challenging that establishment. She invested in E&T O’Brien and also worked in Tom’s printing enterprise as the two were united in their political leanings.

e company imported a small litho printing machine from America – it was one of the rst of its kind in Dublin and considered advanced at the time. As a business, E&T still needed to earn money alongside printing propaganda to promote socialist views. ey printed legal documents (Articles of Association), o ered general trade printing, and printed Second oughts: e inking Competitors’ Weekly, a weekly national crossword solver written by my father – another unusual money-making idea of his. At the time, two major Sunday newspapers o ered substantial prize money to crossword fans, so there was a good market for the solver. e company was located at 13 Parliament Street in the heart of Dublin, then moved to Clare Street, also in central Dublin, in the 1970s.

MOTHER

I was very close to my mother, Ann. As an ex-Jew, she was not part of any religious community. Her main interests were in ne art

and culture, and Crumlin where we lived in the 1950s was, for her, devoid of social activities. She was a young mother with a growing family. Gardening was the only activity open to her.

My mother was a strong character, as she demonstrated even a few months before her death. She suffered a stroke in her house in Crumlin in the late 1990s. I was at work in Terenure when I got an overwhelming feeling that my mother was trying to contact me. I jumped into my car and drove the fteen-minute journey to her home. I had a key to the house and knocked on the door while removing the key from my pocket at the same time. I went upstairs. My mother was holding a phone. ‘Michael! You have come,’ she said, with a slur. I knew straight away something was radically wrong. ‘I think something has happened,’ she said.

She had a Jewish doctor, the same doctor for much of her life, who lived up the road, and he came and said, ‘We have to get Ann into a hospital immediately.’ When the ambulance came, Ann was nding it di cult to talk, but managed to say, ‘I am not going to a hospital!’

Michael O’Brien’s mother, Ann.

Two paramedics entered the house and o ered to assist Ann down the stairs into the ambulance. ‘I am not going to hospital,’ she insisted. One paramedic turned to me and said they had a legal obligation to ensure Ann was taken to hospital. I acknowledged that that might well be the case but that I would not be accountable for what could happen if they tried to force Ann into the ambulance. ‘When my mother says she’s not doing something, she will not do it,’ I informed them. ‘Sure, we understand, Michael,’ they said, ‘but we deal with cases like this every day. If you wouldn’t mind just stepping back …’ As one orderly approached my mother to remove her to a stretcher, she punched him with full force in the face. ‘I am not going to hospital,’ she reiterated. e crew retreated in haste, assuring me that they had done everything they could, but could assist no more under the circumstances.

Ann remained living in her home for some months until she died. e family established a roster to ensure she had family support for the last months of her life until she eventually had to be taken to hospital. I was at her bedside in her nal hours, holding her hand. Her last words were: ‘Michael, was I a good mother?’ ‘You were the best mother in the whole world,’ I replied. And I meant it. A moment later, she quietly slipped away. ‘My dad chose well,’ I often thought in later life when I remembered my mother. * * *

My mother’s parents came from Crimea and Ukraine in the southern Russian Empire. ey were Jews, and were originally called Zhevitovsky, which my grandfather, Abram (later known as Abraham), changed to Sevitt. As a teenager, my grandfather was

conscripted into the Tsarist army, but he escaped; he was captured and spent three months in jail, then escaped again with another Jewish friend. He went to an uncle who put him in touch with an illegal unit that was helping Jews get out of Russia. He then left Russia, aged eighteen, with a cousin, and they crossed Europe on foot, as so many others did at that time. ey eventually arrived in Hamburg, and there they were told that a particular boat would take them to America. But it didn’t – my grandfather and his companion had been conned. is was very common at the time as there was a huge racket going on with ships. ey ended

Simferopol, Crimea, c. 1900. Parents of Abram Sevitt, Michael’s maternal grandfather.

up in East London, where there was a large Jewish community, and Grandfather worked in a garment shop as a salesman. He eventually moved to Liverpool, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Armider, and they got married there. She had been born in Khmilnyk, Ukraine.

My uncle Simon recalled:

‘My mother’s family lived in the southern part of Ukraine – she lived in a town, called a shtetl, which literally means a small town in Yiddish. But more than that, it meant a place where Jews were allowed to live and have a certain amount of freedom. ey were not allowed to own land; they couldn’t be farmers; thus they were restricted to certain occupations – such as shopkeeping, tailoring or any trade using the new technical developments like electricity or gas. ey were the people who helped the Russian peasantry to change the shtetls into the beginnings of modern civilised towns. ey supplied the essential social needs of these places; they made it possible for these ultra-backward places to reach at least the beginnings of modernisation. ey knew about trading.

‘She was a more skilled worker than my father. She was a tailor, a dressmaker and a ladies’ suit-maker. Before arriving in England, she worked for a Jewish rm in Khmilnyk, earned a pittance and worked umpteen hours a week. e only rest day was the Sabbath.

‘ e Jews were victims of Tsarist pogroms … they were mowed down, attacked and their houses burnt. My mother got to Liverpool. She had an older brother there already. My mother was only about seventeen when she left Ukraine.’

My grandfather Abraham (as he was now spelling his name) and my grandmother Elizabeth married in Liverpool in 1903 and had one son, who died soon after. Eventually, they moved to Dublin, where Abraham had a brother, Solomon. ey considered themselves lucky to be there as Ireland was then considered one of the safest countries for Jews. Seven children were born, including my mother, Ann.

certi cate for

eir mother did not work in tailoring at this time as she had a large family to look after.

For several years, they lived at 17 Martin Street, Portobello, but this was not their rst home in Dublin. e family’s location is unclear at times. ey may initially have lived on Capel Street, in the city’s inner north side, where there was an old abbey, St Mary’s Abbey; the crypt remains there to this day. Beside it is a building which used to be a synagogue and the family may have lived beside this before moving to Martin Street.

Abraham was working as a tailor by this time and had opened a shop in Harcourt Row. He was also involved in founding the Tailors’ Trade Guild. In 1938 he brought the rst dry-cleaning service to Dublin, taking ideas and methods from the USA. Over the years, family members were involved in various businesses, and also in left-wing politics.

Marriage

Abraham Sevitt and Elizabeth (Liba) Armider, Michael’s maternal grandparents, from Fountain Road Synagogue, Liverpool, 1903.

My mother worked as the manager in the family tailoring and dry-cleaning business in the 1930s. Her sister Julie ran what we believed to be Dublin’s rst fashion boutique, ‘Julie’s’, in Harcourt Row. Another sister, Jay, was involved in the Tailors’ Union, and later went to the USA and later again to Australia. Celia, an excellent artist, went to London and married Jim Prendergast, a trade unionist and communist. She was also involved in running London’s Left Book Club, set up by publisher Victor Gollancz and others in 1936; Victor Gollancz was a Jewish refugee and had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Celia’s prints and etchings were selected for major collections, including a collection at the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia. Scholarship as well as business ran in the family, as it often did in Jewish families. My mother’s brother, Simon, received various scholarships and studied physics and medicine simultaneously at Trinity College Dublin. Later, he became head of the Birmingham Burns Hospital and a world leader in injury and burns research. e area around Portobello where they lived was largely a Jewish part of Dublin at the time, and everybody knew everybody. e Sevitt family knew and loved Chaim Herzog, who was later to become the sixth President of Israel. In time, they moved to Donore Avenue to a bigger house with a garden.

True to their own beliefs, my parents married in Liverpool, in a civil marriage, which was not an option in Ireland at that time.

Tragically, when my mother, Ann, married my father, a gentile, her strict Jewish father, Abraham, disowned her. He did this despite my mother being a kingpin in his business – she did the accounts, she met the customers. Abraham scored a massive own

goal. His business su ered after she left, and he saw his dream of an extended Jewish family all around him fall apart. His eldest daughter, Julie, had no children; and most of his children went abroad, including his daughter Celia to London, and his son Simon to Birmingham; and his son Benny had no children. Ann’s family were the only ones around, but her father couldn’t accept us. When the eldest, my sister Sonya, was born in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital in 1940, my mother took a risky gamble and presented the rst Sevitt grandchild to her mother by arriving on her doorstep and saying, ‘ is is your rst grandchild.’ Grandma Sevitt said, ‘Give me my grandchild!’ and invited my mother inside. Abraham died three months after I was born, in 1941.

My uncle Simon remembered my father from those early days:

‘Tom – your father, Michael – was a great man, both personally and politically. One of the best. One of the rare breeds of true Irishmen, who were not only good in themselves and to their families, but also clear-headed, political and brave.’

When my parents had their children, my mother named the girls and my father named the boys, hence the oddity of very Irish boys’ names (Michael, Dermot, Brendan) and Jewish girls’ names, though my eldest sister is called Sonya, which is not a Jewish name, but it is a common Russian name. My mother was obviously trying to hold on to a little bit of her heritage through naming her girls (Ruth, Deborah, Miriam). My name, Michael – I was the second-born – crosses the boundaries, being both Jewish and Christian, and very common in Ireland. ere was little Jewish in uence in our household. We didn’t celebrate any of the Jewish

festivals. My mother had walked away from her heritage. Instead, she became deeply involved in the cultural community; she was a member of the New eatre Group, and regularly attended concerts and visited exhibitions.

A member of the New eatre Group, Paddy Byrne, remembered:

‘ e New eatre Group was a most interesting development and one of the nest things that I remember coming out of that period [1930s]. At that time, there were a number of plays with a left leaning coming on the market, mainly from America and Britain … In Dublin at the Abbey, the stagegoing public were being o ered the old peasant rubbish … there was only one play critical of Irish society – ey Shall Be Remembered Forever by Bernard (Barney) McGinn. To ll this vacuum, the New eatre was formed … We put on progressive, anti-fascist plays that no other theatre would touch.’

Members of the New eatre Group at RN Tweedy’s home in Carrickmines, County Dublin, 1938.

One way my mother’s Jewish inheritance lived on was in the context of food. She sometimes made borscht, Ukrainian/Russian beetroot soup, unknown in our neighbours’ households. My father loved it, but the rest of the family hated it! If my mother made borscht, there would be a general strike in the house. Of course, the food she made was quite simple – she had seven children and very little money. When she had some money, she would shop in Magill’s food store, which specialised in Jewish and Mediterranean food. So, in this context her Jewish upbringing still had some in uence on us as children growing up. One event I recall is that when our uncle Benny died, all us boys had to wear a Jewish skull cap on our heads for the funeral. We were told too that the co n must be modest, made to a simple standard form, regardless of the status of the deceased. My uncle Simon told us: ‘ ere is no heaven – you do your best for the one life you have on this earth.’ Looking back, I feel the main in uence I had from my mother was: follow your dream, develop creative skills, aim high and let the world be your studio.

At one stage in her later life, my mother was invited back to the Jewish community. e community had a meeting place called the Maccabi, a big sports ground and recreational centre o Kimmage Road (Irish businessman Ben Dunne later bought it and turned it into a sports complex). I recall being approached by an elderly Jewish woman who said that Ann would be welcome to come back into the Maccabi, meaning into the community. I dutifully asked my mother if she would like to go there. She said she would give it some consideration. Eventually she said, ‘No, I simply don’t want to go back into that small community. I have my own life now.’

She was quite political. My father was very political too. Together, they had lived a wide-ranging cultural life, which encompassed art, theatre, travel and left-wing politics, all of which my mother continued after my father died.

Initially, as a family we lived in Bray. e house there was a small, timber bungalow – it was actually a holiday home. It had three large rooms and a large garden, where my mother grew vegetables and fruit. It was in a well-to-do area of the then largely Protestant Sidmonton Road. At the end of the garden was a boundary wall and the woman in the neighbouring house put broken glass on the top of the wall to stop us children climbing it. My mother went out with a hammer and, piece by piece, smashed the glass to a ne powder, much to the approval of my father; she took direct action! I remember seeing the woman several weeks later over the low boundary wall and asking her: ‘Why did you put glass on the wall?’ e woman stared, speechless, at this audacious small boy who asked such an impertinent question.

ere was great excitement at home for storytime with Dad. He invented a series of magical worlds: one I recall was a home with ten windows, and each story began with characters popping out of the windows to act out the latest story. Years later, when a journalist researching a Christmas article phoned me at e O’Brien Press, he asked me, ‘What were your favourite books as a child?’ I was struck dumb! I couldn’t remember any books, only Dad’s stories.

My father kept himself informed about the Second World War and the Nazi fascist murder machine that had been forecast by his Spanish Civil War colleagues. He also told us children about it, even though we were very small, but he was to go on to repeat

the information over the years. He told us that when Hitler was coming into power, he had people placed all over Europe who could make a list of all the Jews so they could be exterminated. He believed that the head of the Irish National Museum and others were Nazi sympathisers, and that they had made a list of all the Irish Jews (including us) and sent it back to Berlin. I checked this out many years later with one of our authors, Tomi Reichenthal (I Was a Boy in Belsen), and he told me he saw the list in the Berlin Jewish Museum. ere were four thousand Jews listed in Ireland at the time of the Second World War.

During the war my father had a map of the world stuck up in

Michael O’Brien as a young boy.

the kitchen – a large map – where he marked out the expansion of the Germans and the Japanese. I am told he would declare: ‘If the Germans win the war our whole family will be exterminated.’ He was well aware of what a German win would mean for Jews living in Ireland. As a result of his steadfast belief, I have always been acutely aware of the dangers of political extremism and the rise of Nazism.

We all loved Bray as young children. I recall walking Bray Head with my sister Sonya and going to the coal harbour to watch coal being unloaded by crane, and persuading shermen to let us on their boats. ere were also Dawson’s Amusements, candy oss and ice cream when our ‘wealthy’ Aunt Julie came to visit. I remember playing in Bray with our cousins visiting from London. Bray was a great place for a child.

To save the train fare from Bray to Dublin, my father would often cycle from Bray to his printing works on Parliament Street in Dublin, a round trip of around 50 km. en a wonderful opportunity arose for our family. Dublin Corporation o ered my parents a site to build a house on St Teresa’s Road, Crumlin, just o Kimmage Road West. is arrangement was common enough at the time. My father had been alerted to the scheme by a friend, Joe Deasy, who as a councillor in Dublin Corporation had lobbied for social housing. ere was 2.5 per cent interest on a twenty- veyear Corporation loan. e development consisted of about twenty semi-detached privately owned houses built to a standard design and joined onto the excellent Corporation houses on Stannaway Avenue. is was the 1950s, with a huge amount of unemployment. Much of the male population was working in England. Many

became builders. Some came back to help build their own houses.

Moving to our own house in Crumlin was a signi cant step up in the world and o ered more space for the family. I was ten years old when we moved. Opposite our new house, 42 St Teresa’s Road, was a large, unkempt and wild area that was designated to become a park. e houses were built, the roads were there, but there were no footpaths, just humps of gravel and soil. e park didn’t materialise at that time, but we played there anyway. ere is a large, beautiful park there now. I remember building a wind-powered trolley – a trolley with a sail on it. It was common in Dublin at that time for young boys to make trolleys. Most were simply a piece of wood with wheels, but I wanted to take it to the next level, harnessing the power of the wind. I wanted to be an inventor. I found an actual steering wheel from a car and a rack-and-pinion steering mechanism. My route was downhill – down the road to a sharp right turn, but I hadn’t factored in the wind at the end of the road which would catch the sail and blow the whole cart over. Lesson learned!

On St Teresa’s Road, my mother’s background and my father’s experience and political education distinguished them somewhat from most of the neighbours, who had all had a traditional Catholic upbringing, with little international contact or experience. Very few of them had an education beyond fourteen years of age as it cost real money in those days to attend secondary school or university. Many were more familiar with the Catholic catechism than with any other book, as it was drummed into them at school by the brothers and nuns. We were often made aware that the neighbourhood children, and many of the adults, were afraid of going to

Hell – and we were frequently informed by other children that that was where we were heading. In the O’Brien household, Hell simply didn’t exist. Heaven didn’t exist either, as my father and mother were both atheists.

As a child and young person, I was hyperactive – always making things and drawing. One great memory I have is of being in the scouts. e scouts had a really positive and lasting in uence on me. I was in the 23rd Donore company on Donore Avenue o the South Circular Road. Meetings were held in a Presbyterian hall next to the church. Going away to camp was a wonderful experience for me at the time, and trips to camps in Wicklow were very adventurous. Lord Powerscourt, who owned vast estates in Wicklow, let the scouts have campsites all over the Powerscourt estate. Some of the more well-to-do scout groups, like Zion and Rathgar, even built wooden cabins there.

Camp res, songs and cooking on the re on the Powerscourt estate near the waterfall were a wonderful part of childhood for me. I would cycle out through Kimmage, all the way to Powerscourt in Wicklow on a bicycle without gears. As I cycled up the hills, scouts from Zion or Rathgar would pass by in their father’s car (women hardly ever drove in those days), an interesting class di erence and a formative and educational experience for me. Rope-work and knot-making, common scouting activities, would prove useful in later life when I took up sailing.

e highlight of my youth was when I went as junior scout leader to an international jamboree in Sweden. I also went to jamborees in Wales and the Isle of Man. is was a time when very few people travelled for anything other than work, and they usually

went to building sites or factories in London. Big jamborees would have fty countries represented. I loved meeting people from exotic regions of the world.

I became close to a neighbouring family called Rosenberg – the children, Peter and Heddi, attended my national school, St Mary’s National, a Protestant school. ey were the only other ‘unusual’ family in our area so it was not surprising we would link up. e parents were Estonian and they lived on Armagh Road, not far from my family home. Later, Peter and I were in the Clogher Road Technical School, known as e Tech, together and he was interested in cars. Mr Rosenberg was the chief engineer of a ship. During the war the Irish Government had purchased a few ships –they were renamed Irish Elm and Irish Oak. But Ireland had hardly any marine skills then, so these skills had to be imported. Mr Rosenberg was o ered a job on one of the ships. He was away quite a bit. At Christmas time, I remember that they had beautiful Estonian handmade glass ornaments, handed down from generation

From left: David and Christopher (Kit) Prendergast (two of Celia Sevitt’s children); brothers Brendan, Michael and Dermot O’Brien, c. 1955.

to generation. I often helped to put up the Christmas tree in the Rosenberg household, though Heddi, the daughter, was very protective of the ornaments and wouldn’t let me touch some of them. I recall that Mrs Rosenberg and my mother got together to see if they could make a match between me and Heddi! We were about seventeen years old at the time. I have to say that I was oblivious to the prospective match being hatched, and getting married was far from my mind: I was interested in drawing, making things, scouting, and was not well versed in matters of romance. Heddi was a wonderful and adventurous cook, distinguishing her from her typical Irish peers, and she invited me to dinner. We ate in the dining room, where Heddi laid the table beautifully, carefully arranging the family’s nest silverware. When Heddi served the food, I asked for salt, but Heddi declared: ‘Michael! e way I cook, you do not need salt.’ Much as I admired Heddi, I knew I was no match for her, or her mother, and was unschooled in the ways of the world.

When I left Clogher Road Technical School, the possibility of joining my father’s printing works was not an option as it was small and struggling to pay a salary even for my father. So I joined Edmonds’ Sign Makers and Screen Printers. My father knew the Edmonds and used his contacts to get me a job there. I worked in an attic on Exchequer Street, making signs by hand. While working in Edmonds by day, I was also studying by night in the National College of Art, located in the old stables at Leinster House (Dáil Éireann). I had very little social life for a number of years, but for me, art college was not work; it was recreation and inspiration. I studied life drawing, sketching, painting, calligraphy, commercial art and commercial design. I loved it there and encountered great teachers.

Seán Keating, the well-known painter, was one of those inspiring teachers. He was boisterous, active, lively and t. Life painting and life drawing under his guidance were a revelation to me. We had very small classes and Keating always had a live model for a life-drawing class. I was a bit taken aback: a naked woman stood in the centre of a circle of students, and we were to draw her! I was very tentative and timid, but Keating grabbed my brush and attacked the canvas, shouting, ‘No, no, no! You must go for it, Michael.’ He thrust the brush back into my st: ‘Now! Go for it!

e brush is its own master. You never know what the result is going to be. Do it with energy.’ It was a lesson that would remain with me for life. From Keating I learned courage.

Another teacher I had there was Maurice McGonigal. He was more academic, drawing on the history of Western painting. From him I learned perspective and how to mix colours. I also developed an appreciation of beauty. en there was Brian King, who taught commercial art and design.

I had a talent for calligraphy but was somewhat weaker at designing posters. Both my strengths and weaknesses would be spotted. Not everything was positive there. Professor Romaigne, remarking on my weakness at designing posters, said to Brian King: ‘Tell Michael he is not going to make it.’ But I took the knock-back with a pinch of salt. What does he know? I thought. Why tell me that? It ran counter to everything I was learning from Keating: be bold, be brave, attack it! So I ignored everything else.

I spent four years in total at the College of Art, four nights a week, and I didn’t miss a lesson. en I went to the College of Commerce in Rathmines, where I did two years at night studying commercial

art. Again, with most of the students doing day jobs, there was little social life or activity. We were too busy working and studying.

Meanwhile, my parents were involved in education too. e People’s College was founded in 1948 by the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), and my father was one of the founders. ey had a beautiful period building in Ballsbridge, headquarters of ITUC. ey taught public speaking, music appreciation, art appreciation, astronomy, painting and more. e idea was to provide education for working-class workers and trade-union members. At the time, universities were for the elite and rich only. I attended classes at the People’s College that were partially educational and partially recreational.

One class I remember, in particular, was public speaking. I had the feeling it might come in handy in later life. Unfortunately, the tutor was a religious fanatic, using the classes as an opportunity to preach the gospel to left-leaning workers. Most of the people in the room were ill-equipped to respond in front of the large gathering. When the tutor invited a member of the class to give their thoughts, I raised my hand and stood up in the middle of the room. I had something to say and also an opportunity to practise my public-speaking skills. ‘How dare you come here with your rightwing Catholic propaganda,’ I said. ‘We came here to learn public speaking, not to be brainwashed.’ I got a round of applause from the students and assembled union members! is emboldened some students to make a formal complaint to the college authorities, a committee well known to my parents. After an inquiry into the experience of the other students, action was taken. e public-speaking tutor was not heard of in the college again. And

from then on, I was cultivated as a potential board member!

My parents also started a painting group in the People’s College, and my father made his printing works on Clare Street available at night-time as a community studio. Both my mother and father painted in the evenings and left behind truly beautiful paintings: still lifes, vibrant landscapes and portraits.

* * *

e printing company of E&T O’Brien eventually began to make some real money in the 1960s. I was working in Taylor’s Signs at the time as a sign designer and salesman. I was well paid, with a company car. en I was asked by my brother Dermot to join E&T. ere were eight sta at the time – all very talented people, but not with any particular business experience or inclination. My sister Ruth, brother Dermot and father, Tom, all worked there. ey were printing Articles of Association of companies, but it could take some months before Articles of Association were nally approved or rati ed by the relevant body or board. is delay often left E&T with cash ow problems for the period between printing and nal payment. At any one time, there could be over a hundred long-term payments outstanding, often for several years. When I started work at the company, I decided to introduce a 90-day payment period, resulting in more prompt payment, or sometimes staged payments for work already done. It had a signi cant and important positive e ect on the company. My father had great ideas but a laissez-faire approach to business, with little natural instinct for accumulating pro t.

My brother Dermot had been working in the business for over

twenty years, and he didn’t actually have a share in the business, just a weekly wage. He and I approached our father requesting 20 per cent of the company each and a pay rise. My father initially disagreed, but he nally agreed to the shares, leaving himself with 60 per cent holding, but held out on the pay rise.

After I had helped to turn the company around, E&T started to make proper money, and my parents began taking foreign holidays, often visiting art galleries in France, Italy and other parts of Europe. When the dictator Franco died in 1975, they went to Spain and visited the sites of the Spanish Civil War.

Dermot and I were still young men, with young and growing families. By the early 1970s, the printing rm was making signicant pro ts that were not being shared su ciently. I gave my father an ultimatum. I felt it was a matter of justice: we needed to be paid more. But I also began to feel a growing dissatisfaction and unease as I had never really wanted to be a printer. ‘If you don’t agree to more pay, Dad,’ I told him, ‘I would like to sell you my shares and I will walk away.’ When it came to the deadline for the pay rise, he said ‘No!’ So, I sold him my 20 per cent stake in the company for £3,500, a sizable sum of money then. I had bought a semi-detached house in Dundrum with my wife Valerie for a similar sum just a few years earlier. With the money from the shares, I bought a summer house in Wexford, at auction. It was an old schoolhouse built in 1808, with a large garden. I was taken with it on rst sight.

An Accidental Publisher

While still working for my father in E&T O’Brien, in the early 1970s, I had become involved with a number of enlightened activists campaigning to save what was left of the built environment of Dublin city and prevent further destruction. ese included Ian Broad, Deirdre Kelly, Peter Pearson, Bride Rosney and members of An Taisce. Extensive areas of Georgian Dublin were falling down and large chunks of Li ey-side central Dublin were also disintegrating –much of which was being bought by speculative ‘developers’.

In these early years of the 1970s, I put together an outline for a book to be called something like ‘Dublin Under reat’, proposing an illustrated book showing the destruction of Dublin due to neglect as well as corrupt and ignorant planning. I wrote the text and illustrated it myself. I was sure a publisher would jump at it. I sent it to Gill publishers and they rejected it. e only way

forward was to publish it myself, which I did in 1973, using as an imprint my father Tom’s printing company E&T O’Brien. is was to be the beginning of my publishing activity. Fifteen of my own drawings of Dublin were published as a portfolio-booklet, called Changing Dublin. I selected buildings of Medieval, Georgian and Victorian vintage that were of great value or were under threat of demolition. At the time, I had spent many hours drawing Dublin’s buildings and streetscapes, and the work had appeared in an occasional column in the Irish Times.

‘I have tried to show through my drawings that there is beauty, history and tradition all around us, in the old laneways and back streets as well as the familiar buildings and places.’

From Changing Dublin

I was also active in the Dublin Arts Festival, a large, voluntary annual event that focused on historic areas of Dublin. We worked to save Tailors’ Hall, a beautiful Queen Anne period guildhall for tailors on Back Lane facing Christ Church Cathedral. We put

Drawing by Michael O’Brien of Christ Church, published in Changing Dublin

on eighty events – music, drama, lectures and walks focusing on Dublin history – in order to promote the building as an arts centre and make people aware of the history and culture of Dublin’s Medieval quarter. e festival-organising committee decided to clean up the building, and in the process discovered some hidden treasures. We got wheelbarrows and removed the rubbish from inside the building into a pile outside, and in the process we uncovered an extraordinary replace. e walls were then stripped of plaster, revealing vintage stone and mortar walls. e hall became our festival headquarters. Ian Broad, one of my fellow organisers, suggested that we have an exhibition of my drawings. I also published a catalogue of the festival, illustrated with my drawings. is morphed into a widely publicised exhibition, which was opened by Garret FitzGerald, then a Fine Gael TD.

On foot of this activity, Elgy Gillespie, an Irish Times journalist, proposed a book to me: e Liberties of Dublin. I explained

Tailors’ Hall in its heyday. Reconstructed drawing by Stephen Conlin, from Dublin: e Story of a City

St Audoen’s (top) and Marsh’s Library (above), examples of artwork by Michael O’Brien, exhibited during the 1974 Dublin Arts Festival and reproduced in the Irish Times.

that E&T O’Brien were not actually publishers and recommended that she go to book publishers, and I supplied her with a list. She was rejected by six publishers. Her book was a collection of essays by di erent authors on old Dublin, illustrated with photographs, maps and drawings of buildings. I thought it was hugely important and relevant. I said to my father, ‘We have to publish this book,

Dad.’ ‘No problem, Michael,’ he replied. ‘Do it.’

e Liberties of Dublin was published in 1973 by E&T O’Brien. It was edited by Elgy and designed, marketed and distributed by me. In the story of the development of e O’Brien Press publishing house this book can be regarded as a landmark publication. ough E&T O’Brien was actually a printing company, we were now also publishing books!

A short time after these rst forays into publishing, I left the printing world to become a full-time artist. I was keen to develop

Top left: e cover of e Liberties of Dublin

Top right and above left: Pages from the landmark publication, e Liberties of Dublin.

Above right: e Liberties of Dublin title page signed by the contributors.

my urban-drawing career asI enjoyed it immensely and nancially was doing quite well. e media had taken a strong interest in my exhibition of Medieval Dublin – the Evening Press visited frequently to report on which drawings had been sold. e Head Librarian for Dublin City bought about ten drawings for the Dublin City Council Archives. Many of the buildings were knocked down in the years following the exhibition, so the work was to prove a valuable record of old Dublin. Fortunately, I kept bromide (photographic paper print) copies of the drawings sold.

My second exhibition was held in St Mary’s Abbey’s crypt on Capel Street in the north inner city, also as part of the Dublin Arts Festival, and was opened by Conor Cruise O’Brien, then a Labour TD.

My third was in Cork. e well-known sculptor Séamus Murphy invited me down to Cork to draw the buildings of the city. I had met him through his daughter as she had been involved in the Dublin Arts Festival, and she introduced me to her family. Her mother agreed to run an exhibition of my drawings in the Cork Arts Society gallery on Lavitt’s Quay. Séamus Murphy took me on a memorable tour of Cork, pointing out the heritage buildings and telling me their histories. I did thirty drawings and they were put up for sale – and they sold quite well.

I was busy as an artist, and work was rolling in. After the Cork exhibition, I was approached by the Cork Examiner newspaper and asked to do a weekly column on historic Cork, illustrated by one drawing each week. Séamus Murphy helped me with the history. Cork had not experienced the same level of urban development as Dublin and there was quite an abundance of ne historic buildings throughout the city.

Examples of Michael O’Brien’s drawings of Cork, Grand Parade and the Roundy on Castle Street.

So I had a collection of drawings of Dublin and Cork, in a newspaper series in the Irish Times called ‘Villages of Dublin’. Also, with the writer JB Malone, an environmentalist who developed the Wicklow Way, I had a series in the Evening Herald called ‘Vanishing Dublin’. I felt that things were looking good for me in this sphere.

I was invited by Dublin Tourism, before it became part of Fáilte Ireland, to go out and draw pictures of my own choosing, and they would buy them for marketing purposes. I made my way to Howth to draw the famous Abbey Tavern. At the same time, I was approached by several auctioneers to draw the historical buildings on their books, as they felt a drawing could be far more appealing to prospective buyers than a photograph. I received occasional commissions from the O ce of Public Works to draw classical Georgian buildings threatened with ‘redevelopment’ or demolition – the aim was to present the buildings sympathetically and in their best light as the political attitude to Georgian buildings in Dublin at the time often approached something akin to contempt.

en a critical moment came for me and for E&T. One of the Liberties authors, Éamonn Mac omáis suggested a book to be called Dear Old Dirty Dublin, celebrating the culture and history of Dublin. I felt this book held great promise and also that it should be published to promote pride in Dublin’s history. Éamonn was a great storyteller and knew a lot about Dublin’s history and folklore; in fact, he later became well known as a most popular and entertaining guide around Dublin. Would E&T O’Brien become an actual publisher? And would I leave my career in art too and set up as that publisher? I phoned my father asking would he be willing to start a publishing company with me, and if it could be 50/50 ownership. He agreed. I suggested the name ‘O’Brien Press’, but he suggested ‘ e O’Brien Press’, saying, ‘Always put your name over your shop as the one and only.’ I prepared the legal documents. As it happens, my father was also working on a number of books: a collection of poems by the Scottish poet Tom Leonard (who was married to my sister Sonya), e Riddle of Erskine Childers by Andrew Boyle, and Peadar O’Donnell: Irish Social Rebel written by Michael McInerney, political journalist at the Irish Times. McInerney was an old socialist friend of my father’s. is book was intended to be the lead title in a proposed series of books on overlooked socialist leaders in Irish history, a topic that was very close to my father’s heart. Tom also knew Peadar O’Donnell, the subject of the book, from Republican Congress days in the 1930s. O’Donnell was a socialist activist from Donegal and the author of many novels; he was ninety years of age at this time. My father and I decided to go ahead with our publishing idea, and we set up e O’Brien Press in the summer of 1974.

I was working on Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin (Mac omáis’s book previously called Dear Old Dirty Dublin). is was to be the rst book carrying the imprint of e O’Brien Press. It was published in November 1974 and was followed shortly by Irish Social Rebel. Together, these books expressed both my father’s and my personal passions, which was very satisfying.

We held two successful launches: Me Jewel was launched at e Stag’s Head pub, Dublin, in November 1974. e author was in Mountjoy Prison at the time for republican activities. I’d had to go to the prison occasionally to work with him. Two weeks after the launch of Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin, we launched Peadar O’Donnell: Irish Social Rebel in Kilmainham Gaol, where my father had been involved in the Kilmainham Restoration Committee in the 1950s (the state eventually renovated it). e event was featured on the front page of the Irish Times. With these two books, e O’Brien Press came into being.

Pages 10–11 of the rst edition of Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin, marked up by Michael O’Brien for updating the 1994 edition.

However, that year, on 6 December, just a month after the second book launch, and before e O’Brien Press had even been o cially registered as a company, I was to receive a devastating phone call: ‘Your father collapsed in Baggot Street and you will be happy to know that he got the last rites.’ As it happens, I was not happy to hear of the last rites, but such were the assumptions of religious belief in those days. At Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, where my brothers and sisters had all gathered, I remember the feeling of deep shock as I was handed a bag of my father’s things: watch, pipe, coins. e burial took place in Mount Jerome cemetery. ere was an oration by a Spanish Civil War comrade, the Waterford teacher Frank Edwards. My sister Miriam, then a trainee teacher, was accompanied to the funeral by the Mother Superior of her school –but afterwards Miriam was not allowed to continue her career there because her father had been a communist! Fellow teacher Bride Rosney supported her. Later, Rosney became a real force in Irish education, working with the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee in Trinity College, and she was also central to the Dublin Arts Festival and a pillar of Mary Robinson’s presidency.

The Early Years of The O’Brien Press

IRISH PUBLISHING AND BOOKSELLING IN THE 1970S

Publishing was a very small industry in Ireland in the 1970s. I was later to discover that this situation was common in all formerly colonised countries as it took many years for an independent publishing industry to grow. At bookfairs when we compared our situation with that of other post-colonial countries, they were very similar indeed. Irish publishing, and even more so Irish bookselling, was totally dominated by books from English publishers. It was generally perceived as simply impossible to compete, and certainly not to make a business out of it. ‘Gentleman’ publishing might be ne … but if you needed to make money consistently, it was deemed impossible. Writers, especially ction writers, all wanted to be published in London. It was almost the same in Scotland

as we discovered when we linked up with publishers there – and in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and so on. is was a challenging arena for any edgling Irish publishing venture. But by now I seemed to be driven and was determined to try to make my publishing a success.

e di culties of being an Irish publisher had made themselves clear to me when E&T O’Brien published e Liberties of Dublin by Elgy Gillespie in 1973, but these problems became more serious when I became a full-time professional publisher. With e O’Brien Press’s rst two o cial publications in 1974, Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin by Éamonn Mac omáis and Peadar O’Donnell: Irish Social Rebel by Michael MacInerney, I visited all the bookshops in an attempt to sell the books. I was mostly made welcome, but sometimes I got a very frosty reception.

‘We do not stock books from Irish publishers,’ I was informed by Mr Sibley, in his West Brit accent. He was one of the owners of Combridge’s ne art shop on Grafton Street. is was one of the best-located bookshops in Dublin. When I stood my ground, he repeated: ‘Did you not hear, Mr O’Brien? We do not stock books from Irish publishers. Now leave my bookshop.’ Before I left, I said, ‘Your bookshop will not survive.’ And ultimately it didn’t.

Cover of Peadar O’Donnell:Irish Social Rebel by Michael MacInerney.

I had been warned about this anti-Irish publisher attitude by a friendly sales agent for UK books. Still, I was shocked, and had to experience it myself to understand the scale of this policy. I was amazed that such a thing could happen to an Irish publisher in his own city. I found it hard to believe. I wondered, ‘What were these booksellers afraid of?’

Robin Montgomery of the Paperback Centre, Su olk Street, explained that the people in the book trade often came from the ‘Big House’ tradition and that even being in business was looked down on by them. His own family shared that view: ‘My parents were shocked when I went into business.’ He believed in the development of Irish publishing and was very supportive of our new enterprise, stocking all e O’Brien Press books.

Allen Figgis of Hodges Figgis in Dawson Street, who had two bookshops and was also an occasional publisher, was always committed to Irish writers but did not hold back on his criticism of our publishing e orts, ‘It’s a pity, Mr O’Brien, you did not use real cloth.’ (He was referring to e Liberties, and yes, a cloth binding would have been lovely but very pricey indeed). However, we were also showing the book to Marion Murnane, his manager, and she was excited about e O’Brien Press and was to support our endeavours over the years. ‘You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it,’ I told them. ‘We’ll take fty,’ they said. at was a big order.

Eason’s was the biggest outlet in Ireland. eir wholesale company supplied all their own shops around the country as well as lots of smaller independent bookshops. e manager at the wholesaler’s was Harold Clarke. Harold informed me: ‘Mr O’Brien, Eason’s

Above: View of O’Connell Street and long-standing bookshop Eason’s. Below: e iconic sign that hung outside Greene’s Bookshop on Nassau Street, Dublin, for many years.

have decided not to order Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin.’ is was a body blow. He didn’t give a reason, but I guessed correctly that it was because the author, Éamonn Mac omáis, was a well-known republican. But when I decided to call directly to the large Eason shop on O’Connell Street, the manager there, Maura Hastings, said, ‘Give me ve hundred copies and I’ll put them at the front of the shop.’ at was a huge order at the time. But she knew her market – they sold – and she ordered more. It strikes me that the women in the trade largely supported what we were doing, but some of the male managers were more hesitant, and there were far more of them around; I wonder now were they more stuck in the past and conscious of their status? Some time later, Harold Clarke phoned me to say that Eason Wholesale were now going to stock

Me Jewel. It was supposed to be like a kind of gift to me, but in a t of pique I made a most unbusinesslike decision and refused! I told him, no, he was not getting it as he had blocked it when I needed his support. We were later to become friends, and he helped e O’Brien Press to grow, particularly in Northern Ireland. ere were many bookshops in Dublin at the time, each with its own personality and avour. Celsus Brennan had a beautiful bookshop at the top of Grafton Street, and he was also a library supplier. Hugely knowledgeable about books and the trade, he was always full of ideas. Years later, when rents on Grafton Street increased, he was forced to close the shop. APCK was on Dawson Street, and though born to promote Protestant Biblical values, developed into a magni cent – and liberal – bookshop, but years later it crashed, leaving behind a legacy of debts. Greene’s antiquarian bookshop, run by generations of the Pembrey family, was located opposite E&T O’Brien printers on Clare Street. It was a warren of joy –with antiquarian, new books and the classics. In 2007 it moved to Sandyford as an online business, then disappeared. Hanna’s was on Nassau Street facing Trinity College Dublin. It was overseen by Fred Hanna, a brilliant, lovable and knowledgeable bookseller, with three generations of his family working there. Eventually, he sold out to Eason’s who turned it into a mass-market shop. It was tragic for Dublin to lose such a broad and varied shop, stocked with so many interesting books. Gill on O’Connell Street represented generations of bookselling and publishing experience. Upstairs they stocked Catholic relics and items such as bishops’ clothing, rosary beads and so on. ey were also an excellent bookseller, with a republican ethos. ey eventually closed the shop and moved

Bookseller Fred Hanna (right) receiving e O’Brien Press sponsored Bookseller of the Year Award, 1995.

their publishing activity to a business park. Michael Gill was very helpful to us as new publishers. ere were a few other Christian bookshops in Dublin.

Outside Dublin it was di erent. ere were very few shops in the midlands, although there were some great ones scattered around the country, such as O’Mahony’s in Limerick, Mercier and a few more in Cork, and others in Galway and Kilkenny. Northern Ireland presented a special challenge. Eason had a separate distribution operation in Belfast and, uniquely for Northern Ireland outlets, they made a habit of buying Dublin-published books. ey also had a chain of shops, though none in Catholic towns like Derry and Newry, but they eventually, through acquisitions, rectied this. However, in 2020 during Covid they closed all their six

retail shops in that part of the country and never reopened them, a big blow for Irish publishing and bookselling.

Down through the years, e O’Brien Press sometimes developed publishing ideas with booksellers, which proved fruitful for all parties concerned.

Of course, there was also censorship of books by successive Irish governments working with the sex-obsessed Irish Catholic Church.

Many of the best writers ed to Britain, Europe or America, depriving Ireland of a normal, buoyant book-publishing industry. When book censorship ceased largely to be implemented, it opened the literary doors to freedom of expression and opportunities to publish.

Publishing was not going to be easy within this atmosphere of rejection in the book trade of Irish businesses and local publishing. I rmly believed this attitude was a hangover from colonialism. It was time to tackle the status quo head on.

JOINING THE IRISH PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION

CLÉ

I was advised to join the Irish Publishers’ Association (CLÉ) and to make contact with the magazine of the book trade, Books Ireland, edited by Jeremy Addis. I went along to a building on Merrion Square in search of Jeremy. My welcome was memorable:

‘You will nd Jeremy up a ladder in the library,’ I was informed. Me (to the ladder): ‘I wish to join CLÉ.’

Jeremy (shouting down): ‘Who are you?’

Me: ‘Michael O’Brien of e O’Brien Press. I’m new.’

Jeremy: ‘Consider yourself a member.’

And that was it! I was delighted.

In the 1960s and 1970s there was one large publishing company based in Dublin, the Irish University Press, but that closed in 1974. A hundred jobs were lost. Seamus Cashman had worked there as a senior editor, and in 1974 he too set up his own publishing house, called Wolfhound Press, the same year as e O’Brien Press. I met him one day in an antiquarian bookshop as we both had a strong interest in antiquarian books. He told me how he had lost his job and was setting up Wolfhound Press. He became a lifelong friend and colleague.

At the beginning of our publishing enterprise, we had problems nding sta and skilled people as there was no formal industry training available. Also, very few illustrators worked in Dublin. Where would we nd people who could do the job? And how did publishers themselves learn their trade? Publishing is a complex activity involving selection of scripts, editing, planning the layout and look of the book, illustration, covers, contracts, marketing, sales and so on. ere are also a lot of technical dimensions, e.g. using photography, and the whole process of printing. ere were no computers in those early days, so everything was done by hand. It was a tough, raw beginning and often you just worked by the seat of your pants and followed your gut instincts. e new companies were small. e O’Brien Press worked from two rooms in my family house ( rst Dundrum, then Rathgar) with family life going on around us. is was typical of that era. Wolfhound also functioned initially from Seamus’s home.

BEGINNINGS

Beginning in 1974 with just myself, by the end of the 1970s the company had two full-time employees: myself (Publisher) and Catherine Boland (Production). e part-time people were: Sharon Gmelch (Non-Fiction Editor), Peter Fallon (Fiction Editor), Valerie O’Brien (Accounts). Occasionally others worked on a particular job. Sharon was an American scholar in the eld of anthropology, and she was in Ireland to work on her PhD. We published her book based on her PhD studies: Tinkers and Travellers. She left Ireland in 1981 to return to academic work in the USA. Peter Fallon left to pursue his own poetry publishing with the Gallery Press. Shortly after, Íde ní Laoghaire joined us as editor.

Our rst catalogue was produced in 1974. It consisted of a single sheet of pink paper, folded in four.

e O’Brien Press 1974 ‘catalogue’ was a simple printed sheet. e titles we listed were: Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin (1974) by Éamonn Mac omáis, £4.20; e Liberties of Dublin by Elgy Gillespie (paperback 1974), £2.25; Peadar O’Donnell: Irish Social Rebel (1975) by Michael McInerney, £3.50; Drawings of Cork Portfolio (1974) by Michael O’Brien, £3.00. It also included two books published by Tom O’Brien before e O’Brien Press existed: e Riddle of Erskine Childers by Andrew Boyle (paperback), 70p; Poems by Tom Leonard (paperback), 60p.

Front page of the 1976 O’Brien Press ‘catalogue’. By 1976 e O’Brien Press catalogue had added these titles: Skellig, Island Outpost of Europe (1976) by Des Lavelle; Hands o Dublin (1976) by Deirdre Kelly; Tinkers and Travellers (1975) by Sharon Gmelch, with photographs by Pat Langan; e Irish Town – An Approach to Survival (1975) by Patrick Sha rey, architect and judge of Tidy Towns competition.

KEY FIRST PUBLICATIONS

Early publishing highlights serve to illustrate the focus and developing scope of e O’Brien Press.

In 1976 we published a book by Patrick Sha rey called e Irish Town: An Approach to Survival. is was the rst-ever general trade

Cover of e Irish Town: An Approach to Survival

book about town planning in Ireland. A leading and well-known architect, Patrick Sha rey was the nal adjudicator in the Tidy Towns Competition. He was an idealistic and highly sophisticated man who had studied towns and villages all over Europe. I decided to do the book because I felt it was important. But who was going to buy it? I wondered. ‘Every councillor and every local authority, that’s who,’ Paddy told me. And he was right. Planning o cers with very little training or background were being appointed to various planning departments, and they had no idea what to do! Towns were being destroyed. ey needed guidance. When we published the book, we got bulk orders from county councils all over the country. e book had a lasting a ect and a big impact on our built environment. Patrick Sha rey had huge knowledge and high regard for the beauty of good urban landscape. I myself had been drawing the urban landscape for many years, and Paddy and I connected over an appreciation of good urban design, so I really wanted to publish this book and I am very glad it worked out commercially too. Paddy and I continued our association with two other books: Buildings of Irish Towns (1983) and Irish Countryside Buildings (1988). e Irish Architectural Archive describes these two books as ‘extraordinary records of ordinary buildings’. ey were both beautifully iIllustrated by Paddy’s wife, Maura.

Hands off Dublin by Deirdre Kelly

Another key book in the development of the press from this time is Hands o Dublin by Deirdre Kelly. An environmental activist living in Ranelagh, Deirdre, along with a group of students, had occupied wonderful Georgian structures in the 1970s in an attempt to stop

them being knocked down and replaced with ugly o ce buildings. e impact of her book can be seen today in Ranelagh, where there is a thriving, modern community that still retains its Georgian avour. Pat Langan, one of the nest photographers of that time, took the photographs for Hands o Dublin. He gave his time free of charge, as did everyone working on the book. We created the book in a few weeks because there was an urgency as precious buildings were under immediate threat of illegal demolition. Deirdre hired a bus and persuaded about twenty-seven journalists from all the major papers and RTÉ to come on board and they drove around, stopping at various locations where Deirdre took a microphone and talked about why this site or building was important. It was an active and e ective protest. Everyone involved was focused and passionate in their beliefs and desire to preserve our built heritage.

Above left: Cover of Hands O Dublin by Deirdre Kelly.

Above right: Invitation to a ‘mobile press conference’, to promote Hands O Dublin. Opposite: Deirdre Kelly, author of Hands O Dublin.

We published a second book with Deirdre Kelly in the late 1980s, Four Roads to Dublin: A History of Rathmines, Ranelagh and Leeson Street, going right back to medieval times.

Tinkers and Travellers by Sharon Gmelch

Another groundbreaking book we published in 1976 was Tinkers and Travellers by Sharon Gmelch. is was the rst book published in Ireland to be devoted exclusively to Travellers. It explored their lifestyle and lore, including their tradition of tin-smithing, from

which the word ‘tinker’ originated. For centuries, these people made useful things and were a viable part of the economy.

Sharon and her husband, George, were American anthropologists. For six months they lived in a caravan alongside the Travellers. As a result, they wrote a signi cant report.

I have always taken a great interest in minorities and the disenfranchised and I was fascinated to read this study of the Traveller community. Photographer Pat Langan had introduced me to Sharon and her husband. At this time, Travellers still had covered, horse-drawn wagons. In the 1970s, there was an o cial programme underway to integrate Travellers into the settled community, but the people organising the programme seemed not to understand that some Travellers still wanted to travel for part of the year – being on the move was in their blood. Some of these families had been travelling for hundreds of years. ere was very little empathy or anthropological understanding of the Travellers

Photograph by Pat Langan of Traveller children, from Tinkers and Travellers by Sharon Gmelch. At the time, the term ‘tinker’ was considered acceptable, as it described some of the skilled work undertaken by Travellers.

as a people. Over the years, much of the Travellers’ livelihood died out, and a small section of their community was forced to turn to a life that involved crime and, for some, violence.

O’BRIEN EDUCATIONAL 1976

In 1976 we set up O’Brien Educational, a sister company to e O’Brien Press, in partnership with Seamus Cashman of Wolfhound Press. Attempts were being made by forward-looking teachers to alter the staid and xed second-level curriculum. ey had set up a Curriculum Development Unit at Trinity College with the involvement of the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee and the Department of Education. It included inspiring and creative teachers and academics, including Anton Trant, Tony Crooks, Bride Rosney, Peter MacMenamin and Agnes McMahon. e aim was to make the curriculum more relevant and more approachable for students. Textbooks were needed to accompany this change, and this was where we came in: a new educational publishing house was created with the Curriculum Development Unit.

We hit on the idea of turning school books into ordinary trade books too, and, uniquely, these books were sold both to schools as schoolbooks and on the open market as general books. is was revolutionary in Ireland at the time and the approach of straddling the two markets meant that O’Brien Educational became commercially viable.

Between 1976 and 1990, O’Brien Educational published about thirty titles on economics, Irish language, history, humanities, science, social studies and media studies – resulting in books for the evolving curriculum for vocational and other schools. Some titles, such as A World of Stone (about the Aran Islands), Celtic Way of

Life and Divided City: Portrait of Dublin 1913 (detailing the 1913 Lockout, currently titled: Dublin 1913: Lockout and Legacy) are still in print on the general market, having been carefully revised and updated down through the years.

Original and today’s covers of A World of Stone (now entitled e Aran Islands), Celtic Way of Life and Divided City: Portrait of Dublin 1913 (now entitled Dublin 1913: Lockout and Legacy) – three books that have stood the test of time.

One of the stranger items at an O’Brien Press book launch – the preserved arm of boxer Dan Donnelly, with (from left) unknown, Michael O’Brien and Patrick Myler, at the launch for Patrick Myler’s Regency Rogue (1976).

Sharon Gmelch, Michael O’Brien and a range of books for O’Brien Educational.

Changing Technology

In the early days of my publishing life, we worked on paper; there were no computers. Even the printing machines were very di erent from those used nowadays.

LITHO PRINTING

When my father founded E&T O’Brien printers in 1948, he imported two small litho machines from the USA. ey could print using paper or metal plates on a rotating drum. It was possible to type or draw on the paper plates and to transfer images to the metal plates by a photographic method, in a kind of ‘oiland-water’ system where chemicals blocked o those parts which were not to be printed. You could print at high speed onto paper. Litho replaced the classic letterpress technology, which involved metal type of varying sizes. I was familiar with the old system as my

father had retained a small rotary letterpress machine. When I was a child, he let me compose type, picking individual characters from the font trays and sliding them onto a ‘stick’ to make lines of type. Large letterpress machines continued to be used up to the 1970s by newspapers and trade printers.

TRADEUNION RULES

e printing trade was male dominated in those early days, as per trade-union rules. By the 1960s, IBM had invented the golfball compositor, which was the same size as a typewriter, but had a selection of types and type sizes. is machine could justify type (produce straight edges on both sides of the typed page), which had previously been impossible for typewriters, and the result looked like a document printed by letterpress. It created pages of type as fast as the typist could go. is meant that typists, who were usually women, could bypass the male-dominated printing system and typeset like printers. And these typists were much faster than the male typesetters. Nuala Gunne, who worked for my dad, demonstrated the speed of the golfball to some big traditional typesetters in Dublin. She was like a tornado, the fastest typist I have ever seen! e printers were amazed and immediately bought the new machine, but they could not maximise production speeds because their male compositors could only work at a snail’s pace by comparison, and they would not – or could not – employ women.

CREATING PROOFS

Up to the 1990s, books were made up on paper, like a scrapbook, before being sent to print; nowadays it is all done digitally and

Above and left: Old-style cut-and-paste page proofs were labour intensive and open to lastminute disasters, such as disappearing sections of text!

the nal book is sent as a print-ready le, PDF. During the 1970s and 1980s original manuscripts were typed on a typewriter. e pages were edited and marked up for the typesetter so they could see what the status of various headings was, and so on. e book was then retyped into a large typesetting machine and printed out on high-quality paper to give good, sharp print, in what were called ‘galleys’. Typesetting machines were expensive, a big investment; they could reproduce many di erent typefaces and create high-quality galley strips. A small publisher could not a ord this technology. We used the services of Ray and Nuala Gunne, who had set up their own company to do this type of work.

Galley proofs were long strips of print, the width of the nal column of type to be used in the book. ese would ultimately be cut and stuck down on layout pages with grids showing margins, position of page numbers, running heads – all marked out in pale blue lines that wouldn’t show up in print. But rst, the galleys were corrected by editors. e real shortcoming of the typsetting machines was that they had no memory. ey could only hold whatever had been typed in and you couldn’t manipulate it. When it came to corrections, the typesetter had to type out each correction individually, and this was done by typing the whole line where that correction existed because it was easier to glue that down straight. ese corrected lines were then cut out with a scalpel and stuck down on the galley proofs and checked again by the editor. e galleys were now ready to be cut up into page lengths and made into a book.

Images – photos, drawings, advertisements – were photographed, enlarged or reduced in a darkroom and printed onto

high-quality ‘bromide’ paper, then stuck down on the layout grids. ere was a lot of assembly involved in putting the bits of the book together. It was time consuming and a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. And there was a lot of sticky stu involved. Cow gum, it was called. Honestly. It came in sticky tins. All our earliest books – up to the 1990s – were done using this ‘technology’. To form the book, the pages were laid out in spreads, maybe two or four pages. Any further corrections were again ‘stripped in’ – one line of type for each correction. (Sometimes the corrections contained new errors! Help!) Page numbers were stuck down, running heads and so on. is was done by a ‘layout artist’, and is a skill now gone. ese galley proof pages were delivered from the typesetter, usually by motorbike. Some of this layout work was done in-house. We often had the services of my sister Debbie, who was an artist and a dab hand at sticking stu down. She was especially good at tiny, late, panic-inducing corrections. She could stick down one single letter and make it look right! is was a rare skill and it rescued us from a lot of awful moments.

ere were dangers. I recall that around 1977 a completely laidout O’Brien Educational book was delivered to the author for nal approval, but it was left in the author’s o ce until the next day – when a phone call came with a mix of amazement and dread. e whole book had been placed on a radiator overnight. e cow gum had slowly melted and separated all the bits and pieces of the book into an unprintable mess. Another time a workbook was at the nal stages of correction but got wet in a courier’s bag, and the layout artist hung the pages up around the room to dry overnight. During this drying process a paragraph fell o , and the book was

printed without it. Luckily, it was full of bits and pieces spread all around, so it wasn’t noticed!

I found the work very labour-intensive and spent many late nights glueing things down. ere was very little room in the process for any change of mind. It was very demanding. But this is how it was done in publishing houses until computers, with their blessed memories, took over, and the trade became digital. is changeover began in the early 1990s. We got our rst computers in 1984; we were a bit ahead of the posse as my son Ivan, a teenager at the time, was a whizz on computers. Gradually, the whole process went digital everywhere.

Printing machines use huge sheets of paper which are printed on both sides and then folded up into book sections. Each section contains 8, 16 or 32 pages. You have to be sure when laying out the book that it ts into this arrangement, or you can end up with a lot of costly wasted paper.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

rough the transition to digital, the typesetting and layout started to be done in-house on computers. Manuscripts now began to arrive to us having been typed by the author on a computer and they came in on a oppy disk, so editors could edit the les on their own computers.

However, even when desktop publishing software arrived, contractors were still needed to nish the nal layout of book pages, working by physically glueing down elements on expensive bromide paper proofs. When small digital desktop printers arrived on the scene, we wondered if they would be of a good enough standard

that we could bypass the stage of glueing everything down. ese machines were a ordable and exible. However, the type came out with rough edges and looked like worn-out type with very low dots per inch (dpi), which is a measure of the sharpness of type. Ivan and I used various tools to ddle with the mechanism and this resulted in clear, ‘sharpish’ type. e big reward would be reducing typesetting costs by 70 per cent if we could do this stage in-house. We decided to test the process by setting a whole book this way and printing the nal version from our own desktop printer. Our market research amounted to taking the nished book to the publisher Michael Gill (of Gill & Macmillan) and asking him what he thought of it (without disclosing its pedigree!). He looked it over carefully and said, ‘It looks ne’, in answer to my question. With a puzzled face, he went on to say, ‘Why are you asking me?’ So this became the new norm. e computer changed everything.

Wood Quay

At the end of the 1970s I took a short, dramatic and unexpected break from work in order to take part in an issue very close to my publishing. is happened when the site at Wood Quay in Dublin, four-and-a-half acres between Christ Church Cathedral, Winetavern Street, Fishamble Street and the river Li ey, which constituted the old Viking part of the city, was earmarked as the building site for new Dublin civic o ces.

THE WOOD QUAY DEVELOPMENT

Stephenson and Gibney were the architects of the scheme. ey had an o ce in the nearby Liberties, and in 1975, as part of the Liberties Festival, had hosted a show in their o ce exhibiting artefacts found on the Wood Quay site. However, Dublin City Council now proposed destroying the Viking and Medieval heritage site to make way for three large, tall buildings. e architect Sam Stephenson was involved in playing politics,

as were most developers at the time, and was part of the Fianna Fáil fundraising out t, TACA, which was a big deal at the time. I was very opposed to Fianna Fáil back then as I felt their attitude to development issues was appalling. Relations between Stephenson and myself were not good. In earlier years when he suggested that his new Central Bank building on Dame Street would not obstruct any important views, I immediately sat down in front of Trinity

Hand-drawn map of the Wood Quay site, created for the Wood Quay Occupation News, 3 June 1979, showing the locations of key Norman and Viking remains.

College and drew an artist’s impression of the obstructive impact the building would have – it would actually have a huge impact on what was a classic streetscape. My drawing was published in the Irish Times. Stephenson was displeased.

Frank Feely was the city manager at the time of the Wood Quay development, and he had a lot of power in the planning context. Unfortunately, he seemed to be completely uninterested in the history of Dublin and had no feeling for preserving it. In the culture of the time, breaching planning rules was not seen as a major o ence; rather it was considered a minor indiscretion. Some Fianna Fáil politicians saw Georgian buildings and architecture as an unwelcome residue of British occupation and a symbol of empire and were quite happy to see them torn down. I disagreed strongly. ese buildings gave Dublin a distinctive identity and were an important and beautiful part of its history.

SUPPORT FOR PROTEST

Wood Quay was a major site of international archaeological importance. e National Museum of Ireland excavation, which took place on Wood Quay before building work began there, revealed valuable artefacts and structures in an excellent state of preservation – even the old city wall.

Dublin Corporation planned to bulldoze the site and build multistorey civic o ces there. A campaign was begun to try to stop the development. It was led by Fr FX Martin, a historian and professor at University College Dublin, and by Friends of Medieval Dublin who sought to preserve the site as a museum, with its valuable evidence of Medieval and Viking Dublin. A series of large-scale and signi cant

protest marches was held in the city. I recall that FX Martin, Bride Rosney, myself and an army o cer held a meeting in the National Library of Ireland to plan the routes of those marches. People from all over Ireland, and some from Britain and Europe, came to Dublin to take part. Scandinavian groups, who felt very strongly about protecting Viking sites, came over to Ireland to join the marches. It was no longer just a local issue. It had turned into an international cause. e foreign press was also taking an interest.

e marches started outside the Dáil at Leinster House, beside the National Library, and went along the quays to Wood Quay. While the marches were successful, rallying both national and international support, they were failing to have any impact where it mattered most: with the city administration in Dublin City Hall, and in the government.

Frustration was growing in the leadership of the protest that despite the growing expression of public concern there was little impact on the development plans for the site.

e bulldozing continued. en a secret plan emerged among some of the protest group: to occupy the site and hopefully prevent any further destruction. is was to happen on the June bank holiday of 1979, when the workers for the construction company, John Paul, would be o site for a number of days. is would give the protesters several days to take up and secure their position on the site. Also, local elections for Dublin City Council were to be held a few weeks later, and the timing of the occupation was scheduled to maximise political leverage in the weeks running up to the elections. e plan to occupy Wood Quay was kept secret amongst the plotters: FX Martin, Bride Rosney and a few others.

Many of the people involved in the Dublin Arts Festival and Friends of Medieval Dublin, as well as history and archaeology students from Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin (UCD), and local residents had become involved over the previous years in the Wood Quay campaign.

e leading gure was FX Martin. Martin was interested in Wood Quay from an academic point of view, and also from a heritage perspective and as a public space. He had a great appreciation of the value and importance of the site as one of the most signi cant Viking sites in all of Europe. Because of the nature of the soil there, artefacts and archaeological remains had been preserved to an extraordinarily high degree. ese revealed the close ties between Dublin, Scandinavia, Britain and France during this era. Scandinavian scholars were particularly interested; an earlier dig, undertaken ten years before in nearby High Street from 1967 to 1972, by Breandán Ó Ríordáin of the National Museum, had given an indication of the importance of what the site might hold. Bride Rosney was essentially second in command of the campaign – nothing much happened without her agreement. I knew her from the Curriculum Development Unit, with whom we published, where she was one of the leading lights. e other leaders of the group included Deirdre Kelly, an architect, activist and radical whose book Hands O Dublin we had published. She was willing to occupy buildings in order to protect them. Ian Broad and Leo Swan, both teachers, were also involved. e rst indication I got that something big was afoot was when I received a phone call from Bride Rosney. She requested that I tow our family caravan into Dublin city centre and park it beside the Wood Quay building site,

to serve as an information o ce for press, politicians and public.

e Wood Quay protest was about far more than one central Dublin site, although that was important. It became a symbol, a ag almost, for people to gather around, with protests about the environmental policies of the government and of Dublin City Council in the context of development and commerce as well as history, heritage and culture. Wood Quay itself was a national monument and most people believed that being a national monument gave it solid legal protection and that it therefore would, and should, be protected. But Dublin Corporation and the City Council were quite happy to override this expectation, or pretend that it was not actually a national monument. When the issue came to the High Court during the occupation, the court ruled that it was indeed a national monument. Still the development proceeded.

On the rst day of the occupation, I was asked to go to a church on Dublin’s omas Street, and to phone the Casey family on Fishamble Street, who lived in a historic house overlooking the Wood Quay site. ey had a bird’s-eye view of the whole site and could monitor what was going on – who was coming and going, what time security men arrived and departed, and so on. ey provided very e ective surveillance on behalf of the campaign. I was to phone them to get the all-clear when the site was vacated so that the caravan could be put into position.

As the last workmen left for the bank holiday weekend, all that remained were the guard dogs – this had been anticipated by a protester who brought a batch of meat treated with tranquilliser to sedate them. But when the protestors arrived, the dogs scarcely responded at all. ey were used to people being

on site and didn’t appear to distinguish between builder and protestor!

Shortly after we got the all-clear message from the Caseys, many people began to arrive. FX Martin and Bride Rosney had invited a large but carefully selected group of people to the initial occupation – writers, poets, actors, mostly people in the public eye. I decided to park e O’Brien Press for a while and give the occupation my total attention.

OCCUPYING THE SITE

e occupation group checked out the site, examining the layout, the resources, the machinery and cranes. Could the machinery e ectively be disabled without being damaged or vandalised? How could the works be frustrated without any laws being breached? ere were several engineers and mechanics there as part of the rst tranche of protestors, and they were absolutely essential with their knowledge of how to disable industrial machinery and plant. A large number of protesters came to live on the site twenty-four hours a day. ese were supported day and night by other protestors who came for up to twelve hours a day. Together they formed a formidable presence. Builders’ huts and shelters became temporary residences, used for sleeping, cooking and so on. I was there full time.

Around half of the people taking up position on site were students, mostly history and archaeology students from UCD. For them it was like a crash course in conservation. Among those who visited the site were several well-known writers, including Benedict Kiely, Tom Kinsella, James Plunkett and Mary Lavin. Many such

Above and overleaf: Pages from the Wood Quay Occupation News.

literary gures wrote something of note about the site, so I started Wood Quay Occupation News, a newsletter to get the message out. I arranged for it to be printed at E&T O’Brien. ere were four editions printed, I think. Each one had an original piece, written by one of the writers on site. ere was a great deal of media interest in the protest. Wood Quay was an important platform for setting out an alternative vision for what this site could be, such as a visitors’ centre, a museum, a teaching centre. We kept a visitors’ book, and it began to ll up rapidly with names – some well known, some not.

We anticipated the return of the builders on Tuesday after the bank holiday weekend, and knew they would immediately commence construction activity. When they returned, there was a modest but e ective garda presence around the perimeter of the site – they didn’t enter the site itself and left us protestors undisturbed. e role of the gardaí was as much to ensure the safety of the protestors as of the builders because this fraught situation had the potential to escalate into civil unrest.

Relations between the protesters and gardaí were generally civil, indeed collegial. e protesters were not requested to vacate the site. When the builders returned, one foreman took great personal umbrage at the inconvenience being caused by the protestors and he took action. In a particularly sheltered corner of the site, protestors were storing their primary means of transport – bicycles, mostly belonging to students. is foreman, with some energy, began to throw the bicycles out of the shelter, damaging a number of them – deliberately, it seemed to us. I confronted him, warning him that if he continued, the protesters would report him for damage to

property. He sco ed at the apparent irony of the situation and continued to hurl bicycles from the shelter. I then approached a garda policing the perimeter of the site, though I was very unsure how he would react. To my relief, and indeed to the delight of all the protestors, he approached the foreman and warned him that if he continued damaging the property of protesters, he would be arrested; it was perhaps indicative of the widespread sympathy and goodwill that many gardaí had for the protestors and for their cause. e foreman, with what might be considered reasonable objections, expressed his frustration that the protestors were illegally occupying his place of work.

Wood Quay ag.

‘WINNING THE PEACE’

‘Winning the Peace’ was a deliberate strategy of the protest. e protestors endeavoured to cultivate goodwill and greater understanding among not only the gardaí, but also the builders and contractors. Arrangements were made for archaeologist and teacher Leo Swan to give guided archaeological tours of the site to builders, labourers and contractors, explaining its importance. ese tours were very successful. He also gave tours to protestors, journalists, citizens of Dublin, politicians and international visitors. Many of the workers on the site were unaware of or had little insight into the value and signi cance of the site that they were employed to destroy and build on.

FLOODING THE SITE

At the time of the Wood Quay occupation, my family became involved in an unusual way. Some time during the occupation,

From left: Unknown, Richard Haworth, Leo Swan, unknown, Michael O’Brien, Bride Rosney and Fr FX Martin.

the builders decided to ood the site in an apparent attempt to force the protestors out. I rang home and requested that my small sailing boat be brought in to me, and I got my children to dress the boat up as a Viking ship. I arranged tours across the Viking ‘lake’, as a response to the ooding. e lake slowly disappeared. My then wife, Valerie, had been very supportive throughout and often brought in food for the protestors.

MANNING THE BARRICADES

ere was a large crane on the site, and Leo Swan and others identi ed this as an essential piece of plant, central to any meaningful construction that would occur. It would need to be either disabled or occupied. Operationally, the crane became a bridgehead in the battle for Wood Quay. ere was only one seat in the crane. Whichever side occupied that seat rst would hold the most powerful position. ere was an actual race between the o cial crane driver and a young but very athletic protestor, who both scrambled at the same time to reach it. e protester won the race and promptly took over the crane. After several moments of re ection and consideration, the crane driver descended the ladder, albeit to respectfully restrained cheers of the assembled protestors; it was nothing personal and did not give rise to celebration, but, nonetheless, it was another little victory. As days went on it became obvious to the builder that the prospect of working constructively and safely was becoming ever more remote, with such a large, organised and obstructive presence on site.

About a week after the builder returned, Leo Swan and I heard that there was a procession of large machinery and plant coming

down the quays in our direction. We went out to see what was about to be brought in and I suggested we should try to block the gates in an attempt to keep the machinery out. We approached Bride Rosney, seeking a mandate from the leadership to advance the action in this way. FX Martin and Rosney acknowledged that such an action could only be a gesture as the machinery could quite easily break down any such barrier if the builder chose to do so. Nonetheless, Martin and Rosney gave Swan, me and some others a mandate to ‘do whatever you think is best.’ So we led the protestors around the site, hastily constructing physical barricades with barrels, beams and anything else we could lay our hands on, trying to create an obstacle to bringing plant onto the site. In the scheme of things, such obstacles were a minor inconvenience to any building labourer in a JCB, but the action galvanised the protestors, who were now quite literally ‘manning the barricades’. We felt we were constructing, not so much meaningful barricades, as an insurmountable esprit de corps and an impenetrable bailiwick. When the builder’s drivers approached the entrance to the site, they saw dozens of well-organised protestors constructing piles of debris. ey drove on. e protestors rejoiced in the symbolic victory: they saw it as people power over the machinery of destruction. Camaraderie and friendships were being formed in the trenches! An engineer on the site approached the organisers and requested a meeting. He expressed concern about the morale of his workers who were required to be there by their employers, but were e ectively redundant, with nothing to do. e engineer wanted to nd a way to engage his men with worthwhile activity that could be accommodated by the protestors. e men were o ered a free

archaeological tour of the site by Leo. inking it would pass a few hours meaningfully for his men, the engineer accepted the o er. What he might not have anticipated was that by the time the tour was nished many of the construction workers had been somewhat ‘converted’. It was like a case of Stockholm syndrome: many labourers and builders, now with a great appreciation and understanding of the importance of the site, felt more empathy with the protestors than with their employer. Personal relations were softening between the opposing parties on the site. is heaped further pressure on John Paul, the construction company, as a sense of dissonance began to grow among its own workforce. Building sta were even invited by us to engage in supervised remedial archaeological labour. It was an extraordinary scenario. But there were people we regarded as spies on the site too, with one guy pretending to be a journalist and another pretending to be a young archaeology student, both reporting to senior gardaí.

CAMPAIGNING

We then got involved in campaigning in the local Dublin elections. e election for Lord Mayor of Dublin was to happen in a few weeks’ time. e sitting mayor, Paddy Belton of Fine Gael, was running for election again in Finglas. What we decided to do was back the candidates who were supportive of the Wood Quay campaign, and whom we felt should be elected, and blacklist the rest. We had a lot of friends in the press, and we let it be known that we were going to do this. I designed a promotional card, which looked like a voting card, with ‘Save Wood Quay’ on one side. On the other side were two columns: For and Against: ‘Vote for

(candidate) to save Wood Quay’; in the other column was ‘Vote against (candidate)’. It named all candidates.

Mary Flaherty was one candidate elected with the support of the campaign. I remember her particularly as she stood in Paddy Belton’s constituency. e election count was held in Bolton Street College and we went along. Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael was there, and was very much in favour of the occupation. I recall being approached by him, and he told me that he couldn’t be seen to be spending too much time talking to me! Paddy Belton was defeated. ere was jubilation on the part of Wood Quay protestors and campaigners. It was fantastic to have brought down the Lord Mayor of the city on this issue. Alexis Fitzgerald was another candidate supported by Wood Quay activists. After the election there was actually a majority in Dublin City Council in favour of saving Wood Quay, along with the new mayor. e campaigners thought, perhaps naively, that this would mark a turning point. e protestors were extremely focused on their mission

An example of a Wood Quay election lea et, designed by Michael O’Brien, to raise the issue of saving the site.

throughout. After all, they had won a High Court action establishing the national monument status of the site, and this kept everyone’s mind on the task, and kept the focus in sharp relief. John Paul Construction were contesting this. Mary Robinson, future President of Ireland, was the legal advisor to the campaign; she was a senator at the time. When it came to the rst case, at the High Court, the builders had to name the people they considered to be the ‘villains of the piece’. Nine protesters were handed an envelope with a notice in which they were o cially charged with trespassing, and I was included. We had to attend the High Court. e named parties in the case referred to ourselves as ‘ e Injunctees’, and we wore ‘Injunctee’ badges. e court case revolved around whether Wood Quay was a national monument or not, and therefore whether it should be respected as such – but it had been declared a national monument before the protestors occupied it. So we won this case.

John Paul Construction appealed further, this time to the Supreme Court. e protestors had spent a month occupying the site. Mary Robinson represented the campaign. After both the High Court case and the success in the local elections, protestors were optimistic that a favourable Supreme Court ruling was imminent. However, the Supreme Court ruled that the occupation was illegal, leaving the nine named injunctees at risk of a custodial sentence. After the ruling, Robinson promptly advised her clients to discontinue the occupation on legal grounds. What would we do? e atmosphere had changed dramatically, from jubilation and optimism to the feeling of disbelief. We felt that the heroic protestors had, by a single ruling of the Supreme Court, now

become criminal trespassers facing imminent imprisonment. We had exhausted all legal avenues. It was time to re ect on and assess what had been achieved to date. e o cial occupation, headed by the nine injunctees, followed Robinson’s prudent legal advice. A fringe element of hard-line campaigners decided to continue on, against all available legal advice, and two disillusioned occupiers remained on the site – they were ignored by all except a few of us who brought them food and moral support. I thought about jail and also about my family and my business. I folded my tent.

THE VISITORS’ BOOK

Our visitors’ book came in very handy at this point. Anyone accessing the site during the occupation had been asked to sign the visitors’ book, and this made them de facto temporary occupiers and protestors themselves, even if it was just for an hour or two. e names of sitting senators, opposition politicians and eminent professionals from a variety of disciplines appeared in the book, all signed in person. When the injunctees were named, there was the matter of costs being awarded against ‘ e Protestors’, but the organisers had a very substantial list indeed of those who had been present on the site during the occupation, which the organisers could present as a comprehensive list. I wrote to many of the most notable people, all in positions of in uence, advising them that they were listed in the book and had personally signed in evidence that they had been ‘in occupation’ during the period in question. It spread accountability and culpability across a wide cross section of Irish society and implicated parties from across Dublin’s political spectrum. It wasn’t appreciated by all parties, most particularly by

certain politicians who had visited the occupation ‘to lend support to the protestors’ but didn’t want to be o cially identi ed with it. In the end, no charges were brought.

SOME POSITIVE OUTCOMES

ere were some positive outcomes from the occupation of Wood Quay. It inspired the nomination of a City Archaeologist, who would acquire the powers to delay or stop building on important archaeological sites until an excavation was completed and a report submitted. e Archaeologist got new powers that had not been there before the Wood Quay action. e occupation generated a great interest in the history of Dublin for native Dubliners. It generated international attention for the history of Medieval and Viking Dublin, and a new approach to tourism and culture.

It laid down a marker for future developments in Viking Dublin, a shot across the bows of developers, that if protesters could occupy Wood Quay, they could occupy any other site. Developers would need to tread more carefully and sensitively, if for no other reason than to avoid incurring the costs that had accumulated for John Paul Construction. It is unlikely that Dublinia, the popular exhibition near Wood Quay, and one of Dublin city’s most important tourist attractions, would exist where it is today were it not for the Wood Quay occupation. e O’Brien Press would later publish a number of books on Wood Quay and an award-winning book on Dublinia.

What was lost? Had it been preserved, the Wood Quay site would no doubt have been an important and substantial international tourist attraction in the centre of Dublin, celebrating the

history and heritage of the city. It would also have been important for scholars as many of the Viking streetscapes had been preserved and such on-site material is extremely rare and of high importance. ere are many boxes, in the possession of the National Museum, containing thousands of historical artefacts excavated from the Wood Quay site. e boxes remain unopened as I write, and the artefacts uncatalogued or studied. Commitments were made at the time that remain unful lled. A section of the city wall was taken away, numbered and boxed, with a commitment that it would be later reconstructed. Over four decades later, the numbered stones remain in storage.

Dublin City Council Heritage Department have created an archive of the occupation of Wood Quay, interviewing those who were involved. Personally, I have no regrets about being part of it, and, re ecting on it forty years on, I believe it was incredibly worthwhile. Wood Quay was a pivotal moment and marked the turning point of the wholesale and mindless destruction of Dublin’s ancient past. It preceded a radical change in the administration of the city.

Note on the Following Chapters

At this stage in the writing of his account, Michael was not granted the time to tell the full story of the growth of e O’Brien Press and the Irish publishing industry over the past fty years.

However, he did leave text that he had written towards that project, and we have assembled some of this material here. His musings mostly deal with landmark books in the company’s history, the development of children’s book publishing and the all-important sale of foreign rights.

ere were, and are, many challenges to the industry and to the press that we would have loved Michael to cover.

His son Ivan O’Brien took up the mantle of the family business, and together with director Kunak McGann and a hugely dedicated and skilled publishing team, is guiding the company ever onward in Michael’s name and true to his spirit.

Ideally, the book would have included Michael’s fuller thoughts on: the growth, then sudden collapse, of Irish Book Handling IBH, a distribution company set up by O’Brien Press, Wolfhound Press and Dolmen Press; the Net Book Agreement being set aside in the interests of competition; the nancial collapse of 2008; the

purchase of Brandon by e O’Brien Press; the opening of acquisitions o ces by large British and international publishers and the consequent migration of Irish authors from Irish publishers, making it even more di cult to develop the industry, among other broader key developments in the industry.

Michael had written some text on these issues and these fragments are included here. Ivan O’Brien has also addressed some of these issues in his afterword.

e O’Brien Press was to grow and develop hugely in its fty years. e total output of the press is over 2,000 books and counting.

In Search of an International Market

FIRST STEPS

International sales of O’Brien Press titles have grown to be a central part of the business. In the early years, my rst forays into this world were tentative and a steep learning curve.

ough we were a tiny publishing house, I decided to go to the international Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. is fair is the forum for worldwide deals, and is attended by thousands of publishers –small, medium-sized and huge. It is where international sales deals are made and arrangements for translations are set up. I felt we needed to know how it worked and to see if any of our books could nd an international readership through foreign rights sales and translations.

When I contacted the Frankfurt Book Fair to arrange my trip, they o ered to arrange accommodation at a bargain price. is was only two years after the foundation of e O’Brien Press and the sudden death of my father, my publishing partner.

I took with me photos and design layouts of two forthcoming books – Des Lavelle’s Skellig: Island Outpost of Europe; and Sharon Gmelch’s Tinkers and Travellers (with photographs by Pat Langan).

Everything for the trip was packed in an old-style suitcase. is was before the invention of wheels on travel bags. I had no appointments, but I still felt I could sell foreign rights to the two books.

e fair was clearly well organised. ere was an Irish stand, supported by the Irish state through Córas Tráchtála (later Enterprise Ireland), with about six publishers exhibiting.

I asked to leave my case there, a move which I later learned was not popular! A few years later, when I became President of CLÉ (the Irish Book Publishers’ Association), I suggested a special discount scheme for newbies at Frankfurt.

So, with my big folder of two new book designs, I wandered around the English-language hall, approaching publishers large and small to nd a publishing partner.

At that time, foreign language co-editions (that is, books printing simultaneously in di erent languages, to share the cost of printing) were common.

ere were many large independent English publishers that had branch o ces in what were once their colonies. Some of them, I felt, looked on me as some half-educated Irish barbarian – with nothing worth considering for their market. I recall a British publisher

remarking to a colleague: ‘Say, George, there are publishers in Ireland!’

ey seemed to think it was funny. It was an education to see and sometimes chat to world publishers, but no deals were forthcoming.

On the last hour of the last day of the fair, with little to show for my disappearing shoe leather, I was advised to go to the end-offair ceremony, and this is where I had my chance encounter with veteran publisher Don Sutherland, of Canadian McGill–Queen’s University Press.

‘So, who are you?’ he enquired.

My wasted time at the fair was getting to me at that stage. ‘You don’t need to know,’ I told him. ‘I’ve walked around for a week –and nothing happened.’

‘Let me see, anyway,’ he said.

When he noticed Sharon Gmelch’s name on Tinkers and Travellers, he announced, to my total surprise, ‘I happen to know Sharon Gmelch. She was one of my best anthropology students in McGill–Queen’s.’ He nished reading my outline and said, ‘I’ll buy it for Canadian and USA rights.’ I was astounded.

Don then asked, ‘What else have you got?’

I showed him Des Lavelle’s Skellig book layout.

Don smiled. ‘I do a lot of walking, mainly in places of historical interest, and I know Des Lavelle well. I’ve been on Skellig. You picked the right author. I’ll buy Skellig too.’

Today, Skellig, o the coast of Kerry, is protected and recognised as a UNESCO designated world heritage site. ese were my rst rights sales at my rst book fair. Pure chance! A big lesson from this was the credibility of the authors; they were the best quali ed in the world to write on those particular subjects.

Skellig remains in print all these years later, updated and redesigned. Frankfurt continues to be the best-run, biggest and most comprehensive book fair. It used to last a punishing full week, but it now takes place over ve days (with a smaller attendance on the Sunday). It is a highly organised trade fair, with its own jump-on bus service and moving pathways, and just about all nations come to exhibit.

e German publishers occupy one large exhibition hall, which is open to the public, with children often arriving dressed as their favourite book character.

ere is an Art Hall, with full-size paintings bound into huge books. Film, television and new technology are represented. Hundreds of international rights agents have their own space. ere is a professional publishing lecture series, and more.

Today, the Irish ‘Village’ – about ten stands, housing publishers,

A sample double-page spread from the rst edition of Skellig.

their books and Literature Ireland – is impressive.

One of the highlights of the fair is our Irish Party, with on-tap Guinness, whiskey, food and a traditional Irish band providing entertainment. A major asset is the presence of our Irish Ambassador to Germany, who is usually able to make the trip from Berlin.

I have attended Frankfurt for about forty- ve years, and in recent years with my son Ivan by my side. We have non-stop meetings – about seventy between us. We have learned good lessons from the early days, and we prepare and sometimes also get lucky.

THE KEY ROLE OF RIGHTS AGENTS

I discovered that to be successful in foreign markets, it is vital to appoint and work with rights agents, one for each language area.

Our rst was Ruth Leipman, based in Zurich, for German Michael and Ivan O’Brien busy at meetings at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2009.

rights. I met her rst around 1978. An amazing woman, from a Jewish family who ed to Switzerland during the Second World War, Ruth’s Zurich-based agency became legendary. She was one of the rst to contract American authors for German translation.

We sold almost nothing in German for ten years. And then, as we developed a major children’s ction list, Ruth sold many titles, some with signi cant advances and payments, including Aubrey Flegg’s Wings Over Delft, Epic by Conor Kostick and Sisters … No Way! by Siobhán Parkinson. We have sold German language rights for sixty-two of our titles (to 2019).

Over the years, we researched and met literary agents from all continents. As I write (2019), we have agents in Europe; the Middle East; Asia; North and South America; and New Zealand. Our foreign editions number well over 650.

‘A SENSE OF IRELAND’  ARTS FESTIVAL

IN LONDON

In 1980, the Irish government, in collaboration with the British government, ran a major arts festival in London, entitled ‘A Sense of Ireland’. It included all manner of art forms, including writing and books. We decided to create a truly unique book, e Writers: A Sense of Ireland – a creative collaboration between Andrew Carpenter, a literary academic at UCD; Peter Fallon, poet and publisher at Gallery Press; and Mike Bunn, a gifted photographer. Peter was part-time literary editor at e O’Brien Press at that time. e idea was to publish a collection of short works, in prose mainly but with some poetry, written by the most famous living Irish writers of the time. It would include a new, previously

unpublished photograph of each writer, and we would launch it in London as part of the festival.

We also decided to create a hand-bound limited edition of twenty-six copies, signed by all the writers.

e 1980 O’Brien Press catalogue states: ‘ e writers included range in age from under twenty- ve to over eighty. e masters –Beckett, O’Flaherty, Ó Faoláin, Heaney – are there, as well as some brilliant new talent.’

is was a big challenge. Peter and Andrew would choose the writers, winning their cooperation and choosing unpublished texts. Mike Bunn would set up photo locations. We would edit, design and produce a beautiful book to be launched at the festival in London.

Andrew went to Paris and met Samuel Beckett. He happily signed the limited editions, but he declined to be photographed. Andrew persuaded Mike Bunn to photograph a pair of old boots to represent Beckett.

Clearing the rights permissions was challenging, but we got great cooperation from the writers and their agents and publishers.

IRISH BOOKS AND MEDIA IB&M, ST PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA

e O’Brien Press’s early forays into the American market were with Irish Books and Media. IB&M was established by an Irish patriot, Eoin McKiernan, editor and founder of Éire-Ireland, a US journal of Irish studies. e company warehoused and promoted Irish music and books in the USA. Eoin was held in high regard with Irish government ministers and a diverse range of cultural

activists, both in the USA and Ireland. His daughter Eithne managed IB&M. She created catalogues and ran their warehouse in St Paul, supplying a network of Irish gift shops in the USA.

One outstanding partnership and success with IB&M was the publication and distribution of Pictorial Ireland, a full-colour, wirebound photographic diary, from 1989 to 1991.

IRISH AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

In 1997, it appeared that an American Dream for three Irish publishers was about to come true. Irish Book Sales (IBS), a cooperative founded by O’Brien, Wolfhound and Mercier (and later Blacksta ), created a partnership with Roberts Rinehart Publishers from Boulder, Colorado, to promote, sell and distribute all our books in North America and Canada – the Irish American Book Company (IABC).

Roberts Rinehart Publishers, led by Jack Van Zandt and Rick Rinehart, was a dynamic out t, with a air for publicity and marketing. eir catalogue for 1997 listed American history, nature, travel, children’s books and lots of titles of Irish interest.

We believed we had found a US partner with all the knowledge, experience and contacts to enable us to break signi cantly into the world’s biggest English-language book market.

e rst IABC catalogue, Fall 1997 Books, detailed hundreds of books from the three Irish publishers in categories such as literary Ireland, gifts, music and dance, folklore, history, cooking, biography, ction, art, Dublin, religion, humour, children’s ction and more.

However, dark clouds were arriving for both Ireland and IABC. Despite Jack and Rick and the whole Roberts Rinehart team putting their heart and soul into ‘Project Ireland’, the initiative was to

ounder for a number of reasons, including a legal action concerning a controversial book and company nances proving non-viable.

DUFOUR EDITIONS

As a publisher, I had the natural ambition of making it big in America. Another opportunity arose at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I met Christopher May, whose wife, Kristin, worked in her father’s publishing house, Dufour Editions. In their early days, Dufour published ction and bought North American rights to books from British publishers.

I was invited to visit Dufour Editions in Chester Springs near Boston. Despite their rural location, I was impressed with their operation and the sense of order and e ciency. ey were representing various British and Irish publishers. We started working with them in 2011 and for nearly a decade they operated a sales and distribution network across the USA for most of our Irish publishing colleagues. When they closed their doors in 2019, they recommended Casemate, a British/USA publisher, mainly of military history, with a third-party sales and distribution operation. We met their team at the Frankfurt Book Fair and entered into a distribution agreement. It has been a very strong collaboration: maybe we have nally cracked the US market!

INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIRS AND TRANSLATION

Our policy of appointing agents to sell translations – and of course rights to the English-speaking world – led to visiting and indeed exhibiting at book fairs all over the world. Such activity opens

doors for our authors to a wider readership and also contributes to our revenue stream.

An early enticement was a surprise o er from a Russian publisher to translate Peadar O’Donnell’s novel Proud Island into Russian, to be published in 1979. Peadar was a hero in Donegal for his courageous campaigns to improve the income and conditions of rural workers.

When the contract was signed, several established publishers told me that we would never get paid, as there was a block (a sanction in today’s language) on money transfers from Russia. Lo and behold, a Bank of Ireland cheque for royalties duly arrived, along with copies of the now-illustrated book. e illustrations depicted the lifestyle portrayed in the novel – but with a Russian interpretation!

I can still recall the excitement of international deals such as this. Our 1980 catalogue also noted our membership of London’s Independent Publishers’ Guild. Many of the members were large and long-established companies, but I found support and common ground with the younger start-up publishers. It was, and still is, a valuable community; our managing director, my son Ivan, is an active member.

Russian edition of Proud Island by Peadar O’Donnell.

EXPERIMENTING WITH ALTERNATIVE BOOK FAIRS

e o cial London Book Fair is viewed by some as being in the shadow of the highly e cient Frankfurt Book Fair, and has had a number of challenges over the years, not least the lack of a t-forpurpose venue.

In the 1980s, Independent Publishers’ Guild (IPG), with its focus on independents, determined to invent a new style of book fair, one more akin to a traditional food market, in order to reach out to the booksellers.

London’s Grosvenor Hotel rented a large space to IPG. e publishers, many new and young, then booked portable trestle tables and a few chairs, and plonked their books down, especially new titles. en they waited for the booksellers to arrive, which they did. e space was so crammed with boxes, books and chairs that it was a challenge to move around. e O’Brien Press had a table, and we manned it and formed friendships with English publishers –selling in those early days rights to our Wild and Free: Cooking from Nature by Cyril and Kit Ó Céirín (1978). is title also marked our entry into food publishing, a signi cant part of e O’Brien Press list today.

Collaboration was always high on my agenda, and I helped found several organisations, including Irish Children’s Book Trust, Children’s Books Ireland (CBI) and IBBY Ireland, a non-pro t organisation tasked with promoting children’s books at a national and an international level.

BOOKEXPO AMERICA BEA

is book fair popped into conversations at Frankfurt in the 2000s. Could it provide a wider Irish-American market for our books and would we be able to buy rights from US publishers to works by Irish-American authors?

We have always had support for our foreign expeditions from Córas Tráchtála (CTT), who had o ces in New York, Toronto and elsewhere, where they would help us make contacts and arrange meetings. eir amazing, competent sta almost became part of our team.

It was an exciting time and a challenge for e O’Brien Press to exhibit in the BEA venue at Javits Center in New York. We were surprised to discover that the stands on o er were basic, of the kitchen-table variety, and we were o ered a space with other new and smaller publishers in what felt like a dingy basement. We were advised to bring our own banners and display materials. Having become accustomed to the scale and e ciency of Frankfurt, this was a serious surprise!

Unlike the other international fairs we attended, the BEA’s main function turned out to be for American publishers to give free copies of that autumn’s forthcoming titles to booksellers, with established authors signing their new book at the front of long queues. Big-name publishers had ashy stands on the ground oor, sta ed mainly by sales and not international rights personnel. is lack of an international dimension typi ed America. However, Irish America came to our rescue. Barnes & Noble, a giant bookshop chain, with 1,500 shops in the US at that time, had a young editorial assistant at BEA. She explained that each year

the Barnes & Nobel chain celebrated St Patrick’s Day with exclusive Irish-interest books, published under their Sterling imprint. She spotted Colin Murphy and Donal O’Dea’s Feckin’ collection – a series of o -beat Irish humour.

Cover of the award-winning e Feckin’ Book of Everything Irish

We sold them rights to create a big book with content from six of the smaller books, e Feckin’ Book of Everything Irish: A Gansey-Load of Deadly Craic for Cute Hoors and Bowsies, by Colin Murphy and Donal O’Dea. It was so successful in the US (winning the Independent Book Publishers’ Association’s Benjamin Franklin Award at the BEA for American Best Humour Book) that we bought the rights for their compilation and published it ourselves. For several years, Barnes & Noble bought a range of O’Brien Press titles, and not just in the humour area.

BOLOGNA CHILDREN’S BOOK FAIR, ITALY

I give a fuller account of the development of our children’s book publishing and the importance of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Chapter 7.

Over the years, after our rst invitation to exhibit at this fair, various members of sta have attended and sold rights on behalf of our authors, both in Italy and at other international fairs. ese include former editorial director Ide ní Laoghaire and current director Kunak McGann, who joined e O’Brien Press as my personal assistant and who also took on the task of rights manager

and ultimately director. Kunak and Ide are both advocates of our democratic system of management. Perhaps this is one of our secret weapons. My inspiration for this came from my parents, who believed in nurturing creative talent and lived by the idiom: actions speak louder than words.

I had learned how not to run a business in the early 1970s, when I was working for two sign-manufacturing companies. ere, the bosses (owners) ordered, and the employees did what they were told – even if they knew it was a bad decision. Both of these companies closed down.

GOTHENBURG BOOK FAIR, SWEDEN

Scandinavian countries share a highly successful cooperative book publishing programme, with major state nancial supports. International book fairs host impressive ‘Nordic Countries’ displays. Many Scandinavian books are translated worldwide; crime ction is one particular area of international success.

e O’Brien Press was proud when Aubrey Flegg, one of our authors of children’s historical ction, won the Peter Pan Award, for the best children’s book in translation in Sweden, for his Irish Civil War novel Katie’s War (1997). e prize included an invitation to attend the Gothenburg Book Fair, a major literary event for all Scandinavians, and make a presentation about the book. e O’Brien Press was o ered a small stand to display our books at the fair.

MOSCOW BOOK FAIR, 2004

e O’Brien Press had begun to develop links to Russian publishers through our agent Svetlana Pironko, whom I had met in Paris,

when she was working with our French agent, Lora Fountain. My meeting with Svetlana was to become important in my own personal life as well as in business. We were to fall in love and eventually marry.

We had had great international success with Eoin Colfer’s e Wish List, which we had sold into twenty territories and languages. I asked Svetlana to handle it for Russia and she duly found the book a good home. Other titles were to follow.

e Moscow Book Fair was located at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy – later the All-Russia Exhibition Centre. It had a touch of the Paris Exposition of 1900, but with facsimile period buildings, one for each republic of the Soviet Union.

e fair exhibited a huge range of books, some from very large publishers. e biggest, AST, was a real giant. When I met their senior people a few years later and asked how many books they published per year, the answer was 5,000. I asked them to con rm, 5,000 per year? No, I was told: 5,000 per month. is enormous Russian cultural legacy is largely unknown in Europe.

NEWFOUNDLAND, NOVEMBER 2009

Over the years, and particularly at Frankfurt, a friendship developed between Newfoundland and Ireland. It had long been a destination for substantial numbers of Irish emigrants.

Exploring St John’s, Newfoundland’s capital, was akin to being at home. An example was meeting the owners of an Irish music shop: all the instruments and books, and the ethos, could have been found in any sizeable Irish town. When I introduced myself

to John O’Brien, the owner, he called out his son, another Michael O’Brien.

e driving force behind the Ireland–Newfoundland friendships was Rebecca Rose, whose father, Clyde Rose, had co-founded an excellent publishing house, Breakwater Press.

e Newfoundland challenges of breaking into the ‘mainland’ Canadian book market, with its book chains operating from big cities like Toronto, was a direct parallel to the English dominance of the Irish book market.

Rebecca also became active in the mainstream Canadian cultural and commercial organisations that have helped create major supports for Canadian writers and publishers. Government policies seek to prevent a total wipe-out by large US conglomerates of Canadian publishing communities.

In 2009, members of the Irish literary world were invited to the book world of Newfoundland, including e O’Brien Press, Brandon and Mercier Press.

Newfoundland writers read from their works at a range of events and publisher-to-publisher meetings explored common ground. e O’Brien Press bought rights to e Great Atlantic Air Race by Gavin Will, an illustrated book chronicling Alcock and Brown’s famous ight across the Atlantic and other aviators who took on the challenge of crossing the Atlantic Ocean between 1919 and the end of the Second World War. In recent years, children’s books including Where Are You, Pu ing? by Gerry Daly and Erika McGann have been published by Gavin’s company, Boulder Books.

Like so many Irish book publishers, Newfoundland publishers are con icted between the comfort of local sales and local subjects and

the challenge of creating books with a wider North American and international appeal.

However, Ireland has also to contend with EU cultural policies. Many EU countries have adopted a xed-price regime, where the publisher’s book price cannot be discounted, or where the range of discounting is severely restricted, even for online retail. is results in more revenue for authors, illustrators, publishers and booksellers.

ey also support a policy for local supply of local libraries, blocking international library suppliers from outbidding locals on price. For example, in France and Denmark the library supplier appointed is local, i.e. in the same city or province as the public library.

I am rmly of the belief that an unregulated global tendering and supply system could mark the death knell for local book publishing.

A SMALL SELECTION OF FOREIGN EDITIONS OF O’BRIEN PRESS TITLES

e

e

e

Clockwise from top left: White Feathers by Susan Lanigan – Bulgarian

Woman of the House by Alice Taylor – Turkish

Mammy by Brendan O’Carroll – Chinese

Redemption Factory by Sam Millar – French

Children’s Books –A New Direction

In 1977, e O’Brien Press made a rst tentative foray into children’s publishing with a picture book called King Longbeard: A Fairy Story by Pauline Devine, illustrated by Pat Walsh. Printing in colour was problematic at this time as it was extremely expensive, and books simply could not carry this cost. e Irish market was small and ooded with British books, and the economics of picture-book printing required a much wider market spread. Even large publishers did not publish a new picture book until foreign rights were tied in with their own publication, in order to o set the heavy costs of illustration and printing in colour. We had a lot to learn. We should have begun with smaller, more modest projects, rather than a full-colour picture book. Costs for colour printing have reduced in recent decades and this has made colour-illustrated books a viable proposition. Nowadays, e O’Brien Press has a

Above: In the early 1980s, Peter Fallon became ction editor at e O’Brien Press, and with Ide ní Laoghaire and Michael O’Brien created the Lucky Tree Books imprint.

Left: Contents page of e Lucky Bag

vibrant full-colour illustrated children’s books list.

In 1984, the press published e Lucky Bag: Classic Irish Children’s Stories, an anthology of stories for older children from Irish writers. e selectors were librarian and academic Patricia (Pat) Donlon, writer Eilís Dillon, librarian and historian Patricia Egan and e O’Brien Press ction editor Peter Fallon. e challenge arose of how to illustrate this book. Due to costs, we knew we needed to work with black-and-white artwork.

ere were almost no book illustrators working in Ireland at the time, apart from a few working on schoolbooks. e O’Brien Press did not want the book to look like an educational title. So, we commissioned illustrations by the well-known painter Martin Gale, who did subtle black-and-white pencil drawings for the book.

We also published an English translation of the Irish text of Jimeen, by Patricia Egan, Peter Fallon and Ide ní Laoghaire. is story was originally written for adults by Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha and had been used in Conradh na Gaeilge Irish-language classes and later in schools. e feeling was that children would enjoy it in English translation as it was about a mischievous boy from west Kerry who often got into trouble or caused trouble if there wasn’t enough of it around.

e same issue of illustration arose, and this time we invited artist Brian Bourke to do the illustrations. ey were black-andwhite pen drawings, and they were great fun. Brian really enjoyed the experience as it was so di erent from what he normally did.

Another early children’s book was Faery Nights – Oícheanta Sí, written in both English and Irish and illustrated by actor and dramatist and co-founder of e Gate eatre Micheál

MacLiammóir. Each story was a fairytale drawn from Ireland’s festivals such as St Brigid’s Eve, May Day Eve and Halloween.

Around this time, we were invited to take part in a children’s books event at the RDS. We felt our o ering was small and wanting, but we realised from the enthusiastic response to our few titles that there was a demand for Irish children’s books with an Irish cultural context. Intense in-house discussion followed, and a strategic decision was taken to pursue children’s book publishing. If we committed to this direction, there were numerous challenges: where would we nd the writers? Where should we start? Could we a ord the costs? What kind of gap in the market could we ll?

BUILDING A CHILDREN’S BOOK LIST

Why was there so little writing for children in a country known for its writers? ere was no consistent tradition of writing for children. In 1990, we decided to focus on this. Wolfhound too were beginning to publish children’s books, as were Poolbeg and e Children’s Press. We thought long and hard about our approach. We felt that many children’s books were of passing interest only, and we wanted books that would stand the test of time.

As a child, our editorial director Ide ní Laoghaire had read very widely but almost nothing – in fact, nothing at all had centred on Irish children. Having worked as a primary-school teacher before going into publishing, Ide had some strong ideas about what might work. She had found the school readers and history books uninspiring for children, and wondered would history be better served by historical children’s novels, based on Irish history. Would that be a good place to start?

en along came Under the Hawthorn Tree, a story set in the time of the Great Famine. Marita ConlonMcKenna wrote it at her kitchen table for her children. She had heard from Pat Donlon, Head Librarian at the National Library, that e O’Brien Press was starting a children’s ction list. She arrived at my o ce, on her birthday – as she is superstitious and believes in good omens –and handed me the script. We really liked it, although we were concerned about it too as it was such a dark subject, with many of the characters dying, and we were worried about how it would sell. But it was fantastically interesting and important, so we decided to publish. We found Donald Teskey, just out of art college (now an award-winning landscape artist), who managed to illustrate in a way that that wasn’t too o -putting or frightening. Marita proved to have a natural storytelling talent and she was to become very well known for her children’s books. is was her rst.

Publishing Under the Hawthorn Tree in 1990 to such an encouraging reception prompted us to take on the idea of publishing historical ction aimed at readers of around ten/eleven years of age. We drew up a list of possible senior primary historical topics that we felt might be well served by novels. We then set about nding potential authors interested in those topics. We had long chats with various writers; we networked as much as we could, and eventually

Cover of the rst edition of Under the Hawthorn Tree, with artwork by Donald Teskey.

began to nd the authors. e success and acclaim of Under the Hawthorn Tree helped a lot – and it remains a bestseller over thirty years later.

Our next major success in this area was e Guns of Easter by Gerard Whelan, which is a story about children during the 1916 Easter Rising. Ger knew everything you could possibly want to know about the period and was able to use fascinating details throughout. Children loved his school visits when they quizzed him about the most minute details of his book. is book too is still in print and continues to sell well. By publishing historical ction for children, our aim was to have long-lasting books and these books have tted that bill.

Morgan Llywelyn, an American writer living in Ireland, had written a book for adults about Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, called Lion of Ireland, which had been published to great success in America, and we asked her to consider writing one on Brian Boru for children,

Original covers of e Guns of Easter by Gerard Whelan, and Morgan Llywelyn’s Brian Boru and Strongbow.

as he was such a well-known gure. is was also successful, and she went on to write another based on the career of Strongbow, the rst Norman leader in Ireland. In discussion with Morgan, we thought it a good idea to tell the story from the two opposing points of view –the Norman and the Irish. She juxtaposed the chapters, one from an Irish perspective, the next from the Normans. Interestingly, the Irish story was also a female one, told by Aoife McMurrough, daughter of the Leinster king, who married Strongbow. By a strange twist, Morgan managed to locate a direct descendant of Aoife, also called Aoife, a young actor, who launched the book.

Morgan also gave us a lovely treat. She came one day armed with various ingredients, mostly meats and berries, and cooked a tenth-century stew out in the garden. It was wonderful; special moments like this add so much enjoyment to the hard slog of publishing.

Original covers of Faraway Home and 17 Martin Street.

One particular book we published for this age group of older primary-school children presented me with a surprise. It was written by Marilyn Taylor, wife of then Labour Party TD Mervyn Taylor. She is Jewish and grew up in London, where her father had been a Member of the British Parliament. She was a librarian and was writing children’s ction with important themes such as integration and social reform. Her rst O’Brien Press book, Faraway Home (1999), was about Millisle, a farm in Northern Ireland which was set up to o er Jewish children sanctuary in the lead-up to the Second World War. Another book, 17 Martin Street, was about a young Jewish-German girl who hides from the immigration authorities in Jewish Dublin, an area around Portobello. By amazing coincidence, the address of the family in the book was 17 Martin Street, the same address where my mother was born and had lived for part of her childhood! Marilyn had picked that particular address only because the house was up for sale and she had been able to view the inside of it.

Both of Marilyn’s historical children’s novels for e O’Brien Press were popular in Irish schools and they tackled the challenging themes of racism and the Holocaust.

THE PANDA SERIES

Having started publishing at the older age level, we thought we might make a foray into the area of books for younger children. We decided to start a series for beginner readers. Our biggest commitment all in one go was the Pandas. Up to now, we had only been able to develop a series over a long time, but this time we felt a set of six books, all at the same level and all looking as if they

belonged together in a series, would be a good idea. It would make a statement and be a presence on the market. Could we a ord it? Just about.

is series was aimed at children of around age six who were just beginning to get the hang of reading. We felt that the schoolbooks for this age level were very limiting and dull, and that most of the non-schoolbook storybooks were too complex for the children to tackle by themselves and were more books to be read to them rather than ones they could read themselves. Ide had taught this age group and was accustomed to how the children approached learning to read, a very complex task; children tend to lose track of the storyline while they are deciphering the words, so we kept the stories very simple but entertaining. We paid a great deal of attention to the level of language, rhythm of sentences and devices such as line breaks, taking a line break at the end of a phrase where a child might take a breath, thus making the reading as natural as possible. We played with the design of these books too, using very large type and bold for ‘unusual’ words, or for no reason other than fun. Our approach to the illustrations was of its time – black-andwhite. Booksellers told us this would not work; illustrations must be colour in order to compete on the market. But we couldn’t a ord colour, so we stuck to our guns. Actually, the design approach led to the origin of the series name, ‘Pandas’. Our then designer Lynn Pierce was working with a series of blotches on screen, and Ide thought these looked a bit like a panda, and, after all, pandas are black and white. And thus a series was born!

e illustration situation in Ireland was improving, and now there were a number of illustrators working in the book-publishing

eld. We wanted the illustrations to be varied and to be a kind of educationin themselves, so we chose some cartoon style, some avant-garde, some traditional, and so on, as we felt that education in visual culture was sorely lacking in Ireland, and we hoped, in a small, quiet way through the new series to have some in uence in this arena.

As the series developed, we worked with people like Tatyana Feeney, who had a contemporary, spare approach. Today, e O’Brien Press continues to publish Tatyana’s work, with picture books such as Eva and the Perfect Rain (2019), Socks for Mr Wolf (2017) and Mr Wolf Goes to the Ball (2023).

When we published all six Panda books rst time around, this was a huge investment in a series – one we had not been able to make before for nancial reasons. Among the rst six books was one with a main character called Sinead. is was a deliberate choice to identify the series as Irish. We were advised against using Irish names, but again we stuck with it.

e Panda series was very successful and ultimately there were thirtynine titles in the series. One character, Danny, created by Brianóg Brady Dawson, was to go on to have a mini-series all his own.

SCHOOLS PROGRAMME

In 1999, we employed a teacher, Liz Morris, for a year. She was well known for the creative use of novels in the classroom. We asked her to help prepare materials for teachers and to give us curricular advice. She worked on a programme called Real Books for Schools, which proved very useful for teachers who at that time wanted to develop this approach in their work.

Liz recalled:

‘ e Revised Primary School Curriculum (1999) was to contain more emphasis on the use of real books in the classroom. With the forthcoming Revised Primary Curriculum English Language section, we realised that teachers of all age groups might welcome material that gave them suggestions for language development across a wide range of subjects. Teachers would need extra planning, and we thought they would nd the structure/layout of our programme useful. We provided a detailed synopsis/summary of each book and guidelines for themes that would be found in the new curriculum.’

e O’Brien Press reading programme Real Books for Schools was developed as a teaching resource for sixty-four books, with a wide range of suggestions for classroom use on each book. As our books were ‘real’ books, written as ction and not as ‘readers’, we included author proles, quotes from published reviews of each book and also lists of other O’Brien Press titles in our by-now extensive range of books that might be used as reference or support material in the classroom. is was quite new for teachers, but it was to prove very successful.

Liz was also instrumental in helping to establish our Irish-language series SOS. e books in this series were often translations of the Panda books, but new titles were also commissioned and written speci cally for the series. Again, these were very popular at the time.

INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS

As our children’s list grew, we realised that more children’s authors would be attracted to an Irish press if we could o er a broader

international market. In the adult ction arena, the feeling was that you ‘incubated’ with an Irish publisher and then went on to ‘serious’ publishing in London. We wondered if it would be possible to break this stranglehold in the children’s area as it was a new eld. We believed we could sell foreign rights to our children’s titles, and we put a lot of e ort into this over the years. e aim was for Ireland to become recognised as a source of quality children’s literature.

e main showcase and market for children’s books is the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair, which takes place in April in the beautiful city of Bologna. e fair organisers had begun to wonder why Ireland was not represented.

In the late 1980s, an invitation was sent from the Bologna Book Fair inviting a delegate of the Irish publishing industry to the fair. Ide went, representing several publishers, and taking a heavy suitcase of books from e O’Brien Press, Wolfhound Press and e

Ide ní Laoghaire and Michael O’Brien at e O’Brien Press stand, Bologna Book Fair.

Children’s Press, and hoping to meet foreign editors who might consider taking the sales or translation rights for some Irish books. We had a ‘parking space’ on the Independent Publishers stand, which was tiny, but it was a base with a lot of small publishers visiting all the time. Ide spent the week traipsing around, trying to interest publishers in the books, and it was di cult. International children’s publishing is a highly competitive arena and none of the Irish publishers had experience in doing this kind of business. e rst trip turned out to be more a learning experience than a sales experience – but what a useful learning experience, and how wonderful that the organising committee of the fair put it our way. We did return, many times, over the following years. In later years, when we had more relevant books to sell, it proved immensely valuable and important to e O’Brien Press, and we were really happy that we could o er this opportunity to our authors. It was a great feeling to send them their Japanese edition, their French edition and so on.

An O’Brien Press book display at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Later, a stand at the fair was assisted by Córas Tráchtála, a state agency tasked with promoting Irish goods abroad (later to become Enterprise Ireland), and this allowed a variety of publishers to take part. Gradually, the interest level among foreign publishers developed and sales grew.

One book that sold well internationally in those early years was e Little Black Sheep by Elizabeth Shaw. We also sold many editions of Under the Hawthorn Tree. e Japanese edition was particularly interesting. Japanese books are special; all are exquisitely packaged and illustrated. e publisher of Under the Hawthorn Tree had enough funds and thought it important enough to send the Japanese illustrator over to Ireland to research her subject. is was most impressive.

But why would foreign publishers not use the existing illustrations, the wonderful drawings by Donald Teskey? Some publishers did. e American publisher really loved them and felt they would

Left: e cover of the Mexican edition of e Little Black Sheep by Elizabeth Shaw. Right: e cover of the Japanese edition of Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita ConlonMcKenna.

work for their market, but Japanese books look very di erent from European books and the Japanese like to do their own illustration work. It’s the same for covers; they vary enormously. In fact, it is fascinating to place di erent editions of the same book in a variety of languages together and compare covers. ey are often so varied. Sometimes we did this and asked ourselves what we could learn from the experience.

THE HOME MARKET

However, our main market remained the home market. In the 1990s, each year for the key Christmas market, we aimed to have a dumpbin (a freestanding shelving unit) containing nine children’s books well positioned in the middle aisle of bookshops, a prime marketing spot. Booksellers began to rely on this marketing tool and worked with us to create space in their shops for the display unit. As the decade wore on, we were covering a lot of historical topics but also opening up space for contemporary novels for children. In 1999, e O’Brien Press children’s catalogue had over a hundred and sixty titles across many age groups. We had become an established name in children’s publishing – in fact, THE name, in Ireland, for children’s books.

A SELECTION OF THE MANY FOREIGN EDITIONS OF O’BRIEN PRESS CHILDREN’S BOOKS

A Crack in Everything by Ruth Frances Long – German.

Bright Sparks by Owen O’Doherty – Czech.

e Broken Spell by Erika McGann – Korean.

Cyril by Eugene McCabe – Japanese.

Arrivals by Brian Gallagher – Russian.

Gulliver retold by Mary Webb, illustrated by Lauren O’Neill – Italian.

Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna – Arabic.

e Moon Spun Round illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald and edited by Dr Noreen Doody – Chinese.

e Wish List by Eoin Colfer – Ukrainian.

Epic by Conor Kostick – American. Rebecca Rocks by Anna Carey – Portuguese.

Fox & Son Tailers by Paddy Donnelly – French.

Marita Conlon-McKenna, Michael O’Brien, Anne-Marie

Parkinson.

PICTURE BOOKS

ere came a time when we could a ord to do our own picture books – in colour – because of changes in technology. Before this development, we had bought in some British picture books to publish under e O’Brien Press name. Initially, this came about when we were approached by Martin Waddell, a highly regarded picture-book author, whose bestselling picture book Owl Babies, a wonderful, warm story of a mother owl and her chicks, had been published in London by Walker Books.

Martin was selling all over the world but felt that his Irish sales

O’Brien Press authors, 2001. From left at back: Eoin Colfer, Aubrey Flegg, Patrick Deeley, Conor McHale, Frank Murphy, Gerard Whelan, Marilyn Taylor. From left at front: Brianóg Brady-Dawson,

Herron, Siobhán

Left: Children’s author Martin Waddell, reading from e Fishface Feud, published in 1993.

Above: Cover of Owl Babies, a co-publication that marked a change in publishing opportunities for e O’Brien Press in the picture-book arena.

were low and that he needed a stronger presence on the Irish market. He had sold two hundred copies of his book in Ireland and he felt he should have been selling far more. He wanted an Irish publisher to take on his books for the Irish market. is was the rst time we thought of buying in British books for our home market.

We agreed to publish a number of his most famous picture books in Ireland under e O’Brien Press imprint. We didn’t have a logo at that time, and I believed it was essential to have one. I stuck ‘O’Brien’ on the right-hand corner so that customers knew they were now buying an Irish-published book. e sales increased ten-fold. I had a discussion with some of the sta about a more developed logo. Ide hit the nail on the head when she said, ‘Yes, we

need a ag to y!’ And that is how e O’Brien Press got its ag logo. Later, we adopted di erent colours to indicate the varying reading levels.

As we moved through the 2000s, we devoted more time and resources to the picture-book area, actively seeking out talent, both writers and illustrators. Most of the talent had emigrated in the past in search of work. With the dawn of the internet, it became possible for people to work from anywhere, all over the world. ere was the emergence of a new breed of illustrator: young, innovative and vibrant. We gave our design manager, Emma Byrne, a remit to go out and act as a scout for new illustrator talent. e search took time, but as a result e O’Brien Press became the leading children’s picture-book publisher in Ireland, evident from our large and growing backlist of picture books.

TEAMWORK

It is critical to emphasise teamwork in the publishing arena. Picture-book publishing is a prime example. We have always been lucky enough to have a talented team, and I always felt that if you give such creative people space and freedom to work to their strengths, the rewards will come. We had a skilled team, each member invested in the company, not just doing a job.

It was made known that everyone in the company could contribute ideas, which would be brought to an editorial meeting and discussed. It’s the nearest thing to socialism in business. Ide was the editorial director for many years and believed strongly in this kind of democratic approach. In fact, many of our best ideas arose this way. Anybody in the company could request to attend an editorial

meeting if they wished, even if they didn’t normally do that, and could present an idea or discuss an issue. Also, manuscripts under consideration would be circulated to everyone, and anybody who wished could give their response, positive or negative. It made for healthy discussion – and sometimes very intense debate! It was Ide’s job to police this and draw up conclusions. is approach applied to both children’s and adults’ books.

We tried to support progressive ideas in the children’s area. Ide suggested commissioning novels with a focus on women’s historical and social issues – for example, women’s right to vote. One of our existing children’s books authors, Siobhán Parkinson, responded with Amelia (1995), a novel about a Dublin Quaker girl whose mother was a su ragette. e novel went on to be read by many and to win awards.

Many years later, Anna Carey’s e Making of Mollie also featured a young su ragette as the main character in a very di erent book; it’s vital to tell historical stories in a way that will appeal to the current generation.

is approach to publishing introduced a progressive political atmosphere into children’s ction in Ireland, which was quite deliberate. We felt that by opening up thinking and attitudes through our children’s novels the press was contributing to Ireland’s emergence from the tight constraints of fundamentalist Catholicism in education. e Catholic Church had had an absolute hold on attitudes all across society, especially in education. We were never going to allow that hold to shackle e O’Brien Press. We were rm in our beliefs and stood our ground. We are still driven by this pluralist ethos today.

A new wave of children’s literature had begun to emerge in Ireland, with a tremendous quality in the writing, the concepts and the illustration. Some European countries had done a hundred years ago what we were only doing now. At the Bologna Book Fair we saw a stand belonging to a Danish publisher. ey were 275 years old and they were celebrating their anniversary. ey went back to a time before Hans Christian Andersen. We felt Ireland was two hundred years behind – and it was. But we are catching up fast, and in some cases leading the way.

Note on the Following Chapter

For the fortieth anniversary of e O’Brien Press, Michael was involved in creating a celebratory overview of a (very) few select stand-out titles from those four decades. What follows here is an abridged version of that listing which appeared on e O’Brien Press website. Some of the entries are written directly by Michael; others were drafted by the publishing team in a collaborative fashion. Where the contributor has a speci c connection, their names are included.

e entries covering the last ten of the fty years of e O’Brien Press are also merely some of the many highlights. Most of these works were on Michael’s radar and were commissioned by him. All of the team at the press continue to strive to honour Michael’s memory and to carry the publishing company forward, with an ethos and a passion that remains true to the accidental publisher’s vision.

Personal Favourites and Landmark Books

1974: Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin – Éamonn Mac omáis

e press published many books on Dublin over the years as the capital city was a passion of Michael’s. He loved them all, but he had a particular fondness for the very rst book published by e O’Brien Press, Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin, by Éamonn Mac omáis – a book that remains in print today.

2024 edition of Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin

1975: Tinkers and Travellers –Sharon Gmelch. Photographs by Pat Langan and George Gmelch

How times change! When the Gmelchs, American anthropologists, were researching the lifestyle and traditions of Irish Travellers, it was still common to see their horse-drawn covered wagons on the roadside.

Pat Langan was an acclaimed Irish Times sta photographer. Sharon’s extensive research was condensed into the rst popular illustrated book on the subject. It was part of our growing collection of illustrated cultural books, including Patrick Sha rey’s e Irish Town – An Approach To Survival.

1976: Skellig: Island Outpost of Europe – Des Lavelle

Des Lavelle is descended from three generations of lighthouse keepers and was the most quali ed historian and inspiring guide to the monastic life and ora and fauna of the Skelligs.

Michael recalled, ‘Almost all illustrated books in Ireland came from British publishers – so we were breaking the mould!’

Michael loved this book for several reasons: he regarded it as interesting, important and well written. He also loved it because of

its longevity and was very proud that it has remained in print for so many years. He wrote, ‘People focus on bestsellers. However, there is the instant bestseller – a book that sells phenomenally well on its release, then tapers o – but there are also many books in print that might not be regarded as bestsellers, but are, nonetheless, as they have been in print for so long. One of these is Skellig. First published in 1976, it is still in print almost fty years later. One de nition I like to use of ‘bestseller’ is a book from the backlist that goes on and on in decent, steady numbers over many decades. Often the slow-burner that sells quietly over many years actually exceeds the sales of the instant bestseller. Also, reprints are far cheaper to print than new books because the costs of editing, designing, preparation for printing and so on have already been absorbed.’ is book was also one of Michael’s rst international sales, as previously mentioned, and was bought by a Canadian academic press at Frankfurt book fair in 1976.

1977: King Longbeard: A Fairy Story

– Pauline Devine. Illustrated by Pat Walsh is, our rst children’s book, was partly full-colour and partly two-colour, due to the high costs of colour reproduction. It took us another thirteen years to create a signi cant children’s ction division at e O’Brien Press.

1978: Wild and Free: 100 Recipes and Folklore of Nature’s Harvest – Cyril and Kit O’Céirín

Love of the Irish language, literary traditions and nature’s bounty inspired this talented husband-and-wife team to create this original, groundbreaking book. Cyril’s nature drawings are beautiful and, importantly, clearly identify the wild food that can be picked in safety. is book was a basic reliable reference source for many years. We went on to publish again in this space with the beautiful Wild Food (2013) by Biddy White Lennon and Evan Doyle (of BrookLodge, Macreddin Village, County Wicklow).

1979: Ireland’s Shop Fronts –Dee Parfitt, with text by Patrick Shaffrey

Dee, an American artist, was inspired by the colours and design of shop fronts in Ireland, whose special character was not fully appreciated at the time. More portfolio than book, it comprised a series of screen prints in a special folder. at fan window on the front of the jacket was die-cut to reveal the image beneath, a scary proposition given how thin the lines were! is outsider perspective helped focus our sights on the tourism market, which is a signi cant part of our list today.

1980: e Writers: A Sense of Ireland

– Andrew Carpenter and Peter Fallon (eds). Photographs by Mike Bunn is dream team of academic, poet, publisher and photographer produced a literary masterpiece. Unpublished new work from forty-four Irish writers – all alive and writing then. It included John Banville, Samuel Beckett, Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, omas Kinsella, Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin and Liam O’Flaherty. ere was also a limited edition, bound in full leather and signed by all forty-four writers. What an operation! e launch, held in the Houses of Parliament in London at a time of huge political tension between the UK and Ireland, was a unique and bizarre occasion.

1981: After the Wake –Brendan Behan

Peter Fallon collected and introduced Brendan Behan’s lesser-known texts, some published for the rst time. Peter was ction editor for e O’Brien Press at the time and helped create a short series, Classic Irish Fiction, which included e Port Wine Stain by Patrick Boyle. Behan was a friend of Michael’s father, Tom; they were young poets and active socialist campaigners together.

1982: Ireland 1982 Appointment

Diary and Calendar

Published for a few years with Irish Books and Media, St Paul, USA, this combined full-colour photographs of Ireland’s natural and historic highlights with anniversary dates and events – wire-bound for desk or bag. It was hugely challenging nancially and logistically, as it had to appear in May the year before!

Kathleen Behan, Brendan Behan’s mother, and Michael O’Brien.

Top: (From left) Michael O’Brien, James Plunkett and author Paddy Crosbie at the launch of Your Dinner’s Poured Out, November 1981 (an early edition is shown top right).

Above left: Front and back cover of 2012 edition of Your Dinner’s Poured Out!

Above right: Paddy Crosbie performing for a captive audience.

1982: Your Dinner’s Poured Out! – Paddy Crosbie.

Introduction by James Plunkett

Michael recalled that when he met Paddy Crosbie he knew we had a born storyteller on our hands. Paddy Crosbie was born in Dublin in 1913, and educated at St Paul’s CBS, St Patrick’s Training College, Drumcondra and UCD. He was the creator of such radio and television programmes as ‘ e School Around the Corner’, ‘Back to School’, ‘Tug O’Words’ and ‘Paddy’s Playground’, and he made frequent appearances on ‘ e Late Late Show’. In Your Dinner’s Poured Out! he caught the spirit of his childhood Dublin. A cast of brilliant characters were all vividly etched into hilarious life.

1983:

e Big Windows –

Peadar O’Donnell

Peadar was ninety when we re-published this in our Classic Irish Fiction series, and Michael wrote this account: ‘I can remember driving Peadar to RTÉ for an interview – his memory and sharp intellect were a bit intimidating. My father was involved with Peadar in the Republican Congress –an attempt to introduce a reforming social agenda to Republican politics.

‘Peadar gave e O’Brien Press rst publication rights in 1975 to his novel Proud Island. Shortly after, it became our rst-ever translation when it was translated into Russian. Despite propaganda that we would never get paid for this foreign edition, a Bank of Ireland cheque duly arrived. is sharpened our desire to sell translations for all our authors’ works.’

Foreign rights publishing now provides a healthy income stream for the press and its authors, and many titles are published all around the world.

1984: e Lucky Bag – Pat Donlon, Patricia Egan, Eilís Dillon and Peter Fallon

Michael described how ‘in the early 1980s, Peter Fallon became our Fiction Editor, and with Ide ní Laoghaire and myself we developed ideas and formed partnerships with acclaimed artists and created our Lucky Tree Books imprint with three new children’s titles.’

Jimeen was translated from Irish by Peter Fallon, Ide ní Laoghaire and Patricia Egan. Illustrated by painter Brian Bourke. As there was very little book illustration being done in Ireland, we approached ne artists like Brian to illustrate our books. It’s a very di erent discipline, but they usually brought an original and extremely creative perspective with them.

Faery Nights – Oícheanta Sí, written and illustrated by dramatist Micheál MacLiammóir, with text in both English and Irish (facing pages), was originally published in 1922. ese stories with their theme of Ancient Irish Festivals echoed the work of Oscar Wilde.

e third Lucky Tree book was e Lucky Bag, classic stories suitable for children, selected by Pat Donlon, Patricia Egan, Eilís Dillon and Peter Fallon. Peter introduced us to Martin Gale, whose beautiful, sensitive pencil drawings illustrate the twenty stories.

Lucky Tree was introduced as ‘a major new series of illustrated masterpieces from the tradition of Irish children’s stories’.

Fr Niall O’Brien (second from left) in the Philippines.

1985: Seeds of Injustice: Reflections on the Murder Frame-up of the Negros Nine in the Philippines, from the Prison Diary of Niall O’Brien

A campaigning book, written by a socially aware priest who was working in the Philippines when he was arrested with eight others (the Negros Nine) on trumped-up murder charges. Fr Niall O’Brien (no relation!) was a larger-than-life character, and American president Ronald Reagan intervened with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, to get him released. Rather than accept a pardon, which would imply guilt, Fr Niall held on until the charges were eventually dropped.

1986: Phrases Make History Here: A Century of Irish Political Quotations – Conor O’Clery

Times have changed – so much reference material is available on the internet now. e quotation books are redundant – well almost!

e century 1886–1986 was one of massive change in Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell, the Ulster Volunteers, women’s su rage, the 1916 Rising, War of Independence, Irish Free State, Civil Rights, Northern Ireland, Divorce, Winston Churchill, Padraig Pearse, Michael Collins, WB Yeats, Lenin, Hitler and Gerry Adams were all featured in Phrases Make History Here by Irish Times journalist Conor O’Clery.

In the same period, we published A Book of Irish Quotations by Sean McMahon, a literary collection from 1984 that went to four editions, with rights sold to Templegate, a US publisher.

Another research masterwork from Conor O’Clery was Ireland in Quotes – A History of the 20th Century, with a useful chronology and a rich index, which was published in October 1999.

1987: Irish Rock – Mark Prendergast

In the 1980s, Enya was huge, U2 were taking over the world and Van Morrison was on every radio station. is was a remarkable period for Irish popular music, and Mark Prendergast buried himself in research to follow the lives of key musicians, from traditional music roots to pop and rock. With Sweeney’s Men in the same book as Sinéad O’Connor, it was an exhaustive labour of love. David Rooney’s amazing cover captures the sheer diversity of the Irish music scene. e book was published in America as Isle of Noise: I think we prefer our title!

1988: Anna Liffey: e River of Dublin – Stephen Conlin and John de Courcy

Stephen Conlin, an architectural reconstruction artist of some genius, agreed to create two amazing projects:

1. Anna Li ey incorporated huge, full-colour maps showing all the major buildings along the Li ey in the 1980s, including reconstructed views of Viking towns, medieval walls, St Mary’s Abbey, lost bridges and much more.

Stephen’s partner on the project, John De Courcy, added drawings and historical text on Dublin life, trading, people from history, and structures all along the river.

We also printed 1,000 copies of the map and sold them separately.

2. Stephen created reconstruction illustrations of many of Dublin’s iconic buildings and scenes from the previous thousand years. Intended to be published in a lavish hardback for the millennium of the city, the text never appeared and instead we published a mini version of Dublin: 1000 Years – a tiny souvenir book with the illustrations. ey were later published as intended, updated and with new drawings added, in Dublin: e Story of a City, published in 2016, with a text by Peter Harbison.

1989: e Midnight Court –

Brian Merriman. Translated by Frank O’Connor. Illustrated by Brian Bourke

An irresistible trio of talents created this award-winning edition of an eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece. Frank O’Connor’s lively rendering of Brian Merriman’s work was teamed with drawings from a master of contemporary art, Brian Bourke.

Adam Clayton from U2, who launched the book, John Masterson, RTÉ producer and former lecturer, who enabled John Mordaunt tell his story, with Michael O’Brien at the launch of Facing Up to AIDS.

1989:

John Mordaunt: Facing Up to AIDS –

As told to John Masterson

A moving, personal account of an AIDS su erer at a time when those who su ered from AIDS were feared and ostracised. John Mordaunt was given his rst x of heroin as a birthday present when he was fourteen years of age. He vividly recalls his schooldays and how his life became dominated by drugs. en he contracted AIDS. In the early days of fear and hysteria amongst both the general public and the medical profession, John went on RTÉ television to talk openly as an AIDS su erer. He also featured in the BBC documentary ‘Facing Up to AIDS’. John worked tirelessly to help people with AIDS.

1990: Mary Robinson: A President with a Purpose – Fergus Finlay

In 1990, Mary Robinson and Bride Rosney were in the early stages of campaigning for Mary Robinson as President of Ireland, standing as a Labour Party candidate. Labour had little support at the time, and many felt it was unlikely that she would win. However, Michael was convinced she would win (and win, she did). Michael felt e O’Brien Press should do a book on the campaign and publish it to coincide with Robinson’s acceptance speech in Dublin Castle.

‘Her inauguration was anticipated with great interest. What would she say? e O’Brien Press had one week to turn the book around. We had hoped to publish on the day of the inauguration, but we had to wait for the nal version of her speech. e book was released two days after the speech was delivered. It was a major feat of publishing to turn it around with such speed.’

Fergus Finlay, a brilliant advisor to Dick Spring in government, created all the additional text in record time.

1991: Wildflower Girl – Marita Conlon-McKenna

In 1990, we published Under the Hawthorn Tree, the rst novel by a new children’s author, Marita Conlon-McKenna. We were told by many people that a children’s novel set in famine-ridden Ireland would never get an audience, but we had full faith in the story. What

we hadn’t fully realised was the desire Irish people had to read stories about our own history. By the time the sequel, Wild ower Girl, was published the next year, Marita was a star and a whole new genre had been born.

We quickly realised that there were huge numbers of stories that needed to be told about our own place and times, and rapidly worked with authors like Gerard Whelan ( e Guns of Easter, A Winter of Spies) and Siobhán Parkinson (Amelia, No Peace for Amelia) to open the doors of Irish history to our children. With over thirty books now available covering pre-history to the Northern Ireland con ict, Marita’s spark has led to a richness we are very proud to have brought to life.

Author Marita Conlon-McKenna and artist Donald Teskey, who illustrated the hugely successful original famine trilogy that included Under the Hawthorn Tree, Wild ower Girl and Fields of Home

1992: Follow Your Dream – Daniel O’Donnell with Eddie Rowley

Our rst major commercial success came in 1992. is was Follow Your Dream by Daniel O’Donnell (written by music journalist Eddie Rowley). We only had six people in the company at the time and we would meet as a board once a month. Mary Webb, our publicity manager, came up with the idea, quite revolutionary for e O’Brien Press at the time: ‘Why don’t we just try and make money?’ Everyone agreed, but what should we publish? We had no track record in purely commercial publishing. Mary said she would have a good think about it and come back in one month with ideas. She did exactly that, and said, ‘What about a biography of Daniel O’Donnell?’ He had never done one and he was a hugely successful performer. Eddie Rowley was a popular music journalist at the Sunday World, and he knew Daniel well and had covered his shows. He was well placed to write such a book.

We sold 75,000 copies. is was a huge number for any small publisher. We had massive signing sessions, where the queue was so long it stretched out of the venue, onto the street, and, in the case of Eason’s, down O’Connell Street.

With many of the books nding a market in Britain, we were reminded that there are millions of Irish in England. Ritz Records in London was partially owned by Daniel, and they had thousands of O’Donnell fans on their database. Our book worked really well for them. I travelled with Daniel in England, as well as to Cork

and Belfast, for book launches and signings. I learned a lot from watching him operate.

With this publication, we realised that publishing some purely commercial books could help put the company on a stronger nancial footing. e success of the book changed the nature of the company, giving the rm a sharper commercial focus.

We also learned that adaptation is very important to a publisher, especially in a small home market. rough the years, we continuously opened up new areas of publishing: children’s ction books, then picture books, tourist books where we became a major publisher, humour, cookbooks and so on. Diversi cation was very important.

1993: When Love Comes to Town – Tom Lennon

In social terms, one of the most signi cant books we published was When Love Comes to Town by Tom Lennon (a pseudonym).

It was the rst account to be published in Ireland by an Irish publisher of what it was like to grow up as a gay man. Written as ction, it was an honest portrayal of his experiences. Tom Lennon was a teacher.

When we were publicising the book, Michael recalled how we asked Tom to go on television and radio, and he said, ‘I can’t show my face or I will be sacked in ten minutes.’ He did, however, go on radio when they agreed to a voice distortion. e book was accepted on the market in a more open way than

Michael had expected and was generally warmly received by Irish society. Reviews praised the book: ‘In many ways his work is superior to Catcher in the Rye.’ ( e Irish Times) ere were some exceptions: at a meeting, a librarian denounced e O’Brien Press for publishing the book. Michael stood up and demanded a right to reply, which was granted. He said that the library was a disgrace for not stocking this book, ending with: ‘If you want to ban O’Brien books, re ahead!’ While many in the audience no doubt held passionate views on the subject, no one rose to support either side. But booksellers supported the book.

Tom Lennon’s book played no small part in contributing to a radical shift in Irish society.

1994: Fear of the Collar: My Terrifying Childhood in Artane – Patrick Touher

In recent years, many books have been written about clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, but in the early 1990s, such books were unheard of and highly risky.

In 1991 we published the rst edition of a book on growing up as an orphan in Artane Industrial School, Fear of the Collar by Patrick Touher. A second edition followed in 1994 and in 2001 we published an updated edition, with several additional chapters.

People were shocked by the level of cruelty revealed in the book. Young children were taken to the industrial school on court orders and not even told what was happening to them. ere was a lot of sexual exploitation – this part of the story was withheld until the

second edition of the book for legal reasons.

e launch of the book was an emotional one; I remember being moved to tears. Some friends of Patrick who had spent time with him in Artane and had moved to England to get away from Ireland came back for the launch. One man reported he felt he had to return to support Patrick, as he was the speaking out for them all, and making public the abuse they had su ered in Artane.

1995:

Amelia (2nd Edition) –

Siobhán Parkinson

In 1990, we published Marita ConlonMcKenna’s breakthrough novel Under the Hawthorn Tree, which won the International Reading Association Award in the USA and was translated extensively. During this period, we were actively seeking new talent to write novels for young readers – Ide ní

Laoghaíre was the brains and the drive behind this project.

Ide commissioned Siobhán Parkinson to write a historical novel. Siobhán began a novel about a Quaker family, the Pims, and Amelia was born: ‘ e year is 1914. Amelia Pim will soon be thirteen. ere are rumours of war and rebellion ...’

Siobhán went on to write numerous children’s books, including: e Henny Penny Tree, e Leprechaun Who Wished He Wasn’t, Sisters: No Way (winner of the Bisto Award, translated into thirteen languages), and Four Kids, ree Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe).

Siobhán is one of the gifted writers who helped us ful l an

almost impossible goal – to create a new literature for children in Ireland, with an international appeal. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ireland was almost totally dominated by British children’s books. Siobhán became Ireland’s rst Children’s Laureate na nÓg, sponsored by e Arts Council of Ireland and Children’s Books Ireland, and went on to found her own children’s publishing company, Little Island.

1996: e General: Godfather of Crime – Paul Williams

e way that Ireland talked about crime and criminals was completely di erent in 1996. It is hard to believe now, but broadsheets and broadcast media simply did not cover the area at all. Paul Williams, then a journalist with the Sunday World, understood that there was huge public interest in the lives of major gangland criminals.

When e General was published, it was a huge bestseller: within ve months it was printed ve times, a total of 45,000 books. It spawned a whole publishing genre, and showed the rest of the newspapers, TV and radio that there was a real appetite for more detail on the world of crime and criminals.

Another boost to sales of the book came when John Boorman directed a movie adaptation, starring a talented young Brendan Gleeson in the title role, and stylishly shot in black and white with a brilliant soundtrack by Richie Buckley. is rst-ever cinematic

adaptation of an O’Brien Press book came only three years after the book was published.

1996: Crowning the Customer: How to Become Customer-Driven – Feargal Quinn

Feargal Quinn (a future senator) was the founder of the Superquinn supermarket chain. He introduced the idea to Ireland of putting customers rst. Michael said, ‘When he phoned me about his book I arranged to meet him the next day. He explained that he had written a “customer-driven” manual for new employees and it was tiresome to keep copying it for each new employee. He wanted it in book form, suitable for any business person to read on a short ight. We created a signi cant marketing plan, and Feargal arranged for Don Keogh, head of Coca Cola Worldwide, to speak at a spectacular launch.

‘We printed six runs in the rst three years; big retailers like Sainsburys bought it in bulk for their managers. Its messages were carried to the world with translations in Arabic, Chinese, Danish, German, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.’

Feargal created another book in 2013, Mind Your Own Business – Survive and rive in Good Times and Bad, following his TV series Retail erapy. Topics included innovation, succession, changing with the times, and start-ups. Feargal also published a memoir with us: Quinntessential Feargal, in 2016.

1997: Irish Stone Walls: History, Building, Conservation

– Pat McAfee

Pat McAfee is a talented stone mason and expert in traditional Irish stone walls, the type that every tourist in the west of Ireland loves to photograph. He saw that the ancient craft of building enduring stone walls, without the need for cement or other renders, was fading, and was appalled by some of the restoration e orts that had made things even worse. Pat’s rst book Irish Stone Walls (he later followed it with Stone Buildings) is subtitled History, Building, Conservation and has become the bible for all who care about these beautiful structures. Nobody knew what the market would be for this book, but after three printings within four months (and some very confused printers, who couldn’t believe we needed yet more copies of a book about stone walls), it became clear that we had a hit on our hands. Ireland’s built heritage owes a big debt to Pat, and the quality of wall-building and conservation has improved as a direct result of his books, training and consultancy.

1998: Between the Mountains and the Sea: Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County

– Peter Pearson

Peter Pearson knows everything there is to know about the buildings and heritage of Dublin, and south Dublin in particular, and we had published his book Dun

Laoghaire: Kingstown in 1981. A collector of photographs, paintings and ephemera, he had a wealth of visual material available. We thought it was time that all of this was brought together and one of our biggest-ever projects was born. Weighing in at 384 pages and with over 700 images, as well as 30 maps, it was an enormous challenge to produce with the tools available in 1998, and we were often running three computers simultaneously (one for scanning, one for image editing and a third for page layout). Peter would arrive with photographs that were damaged almost beyond use, maps of all shapes, sizes and vintages (‘just blow up that TINY bit there’) and objects of all sorts to be added to the book. Peter followed with e Heart of Dublin (covering the centre of Dublin) and his Decorative Dublin (concentrating on the details and decorations that adorn the city). Republished with a new introductory section in 2007, Between the Mountains and the Sea has sold over 16,000 copies.

1999: e Mammy –Brendan O’Carroll

Not the year of the book, but the year of the lm! First published in 1994, e Mammy has been bigger than anybody ever thought. Brendan O’Carroll’s tale of a mother struggling to make ends meet and bringing up a gang of unruly kids felt quintessentially Irish, but it has been published in the US and Australia as well as in Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian, Polish and Italian, among others. is was another commercial book instigated by Mary Webb.

Brendan was big on the comedy scene in Dublin, and Mary felt that a book on his main character would work. We went on to publish three books featuring Agnes Browne, all successful. e full reach of Brendan’s characters rst became clear when in 1999 Anjelica Huston chose to make her directorial debut with her movie Agnes Browne, casting herself in the title role with actors both Irish (Gerard McSorley, June Rogers) and international (Ray Winstone, Tom Jones): as well as Brendan O’Carroll himself as ‘Seamus the Drunk’. A movie tie-in cover and many sales followed. ese days Brendan himself plays Agnes in the huge international hit TV series ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’.

1999: John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland – John Cooney In 1999, we published another highly controversial book, an in-depth biography of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, who for three decades (1940–1970) wielded considerable religious, social and political power and instilled fear among his clergy and laity. e author of this work, John Cooney, journalist and broadcaster, was given access to les in the Bishop’s Palace in Drumcondra.

Michael recalled: ‘When I read the rst draft of the book, I was struck by the vice-like grip this gure had on Irish society. ere was a whole section regarding banning books, with details of correspondence between McQuaid, the then Minister of Justice

Charles Haughey and William Godfrey, the Archbishop of Westminister, which focused on the author Edna O’Brien and her books e Country Girls and e Lonely Girl, both of which were banned by the censor in 1960s Ireland. I was especially interested as my father, omas O’Brien, had known her well; they both lived in Phibsboro, where she worked in a chemist’s shop before emigrating to London.’

e book also showed that the head of the Legion of Mary, Frank Du , tried to establish a dialogue between all faiths in Ireland, including the Jewish community and Catholics. However, Du was required to refer to McQuaid in all these matters, and he struggled to promote tolerance and understanding as a result. Such was the power and control of this religious gure in Irish society of the time.

2000: e Wish List – Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer’s rst book, Benny and Omar, arrived unsolicited into our o ces and immediately drew us all into the world of his imagination and humour. A real pleasure to work with, Eoin hoovered up knowledge and insights into the world of books wherever he could, and his writing prowess grew rapidly. By the time we did his sixth book, e Wish List, he was a star of the Irish literary scene and one of the rst authors we talked to foreign publishers about at book fairs. When his rst Artemis Fowl book (not with us, unfortunately) was pitched as the Next Big ing at the Frankfurt Book Fair, we succeeded in selling translation rights to e Wish List

in over thirty languages. Eoin went on to become one of the world’s most popular children’s authors.

2001: Wild Irish Women: Extraordinary Lives from History – Marian Broderick

e issue of women being rubbed out of history was raised by our editorial board on di erent occasions over the years. Marian Broderick in her introduction says: ‘In amongst all the brave and foolhardy deeds of long-ago, Ireland seldom hears of the women.’ e contents of her book shows there were famous writers, wives and lovers, the great pretenders (women who pretended to be men to get on in the world), women on the front line in war and medicine, revolutionaries, su ragettes, saints and sinners, stars of stage and screen, artists like Sarah Purser and the Yeats sisters, and many more. First published as a handsome hardback, it’s been in print in paperback ever since.

2003: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly: e Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years –

Paul Howard

Paul Howard was a sports journalist whom e O’Brien Press had published several times: boxer Steve Collins’ autobiography Celtic Warrior, e Joy (about life in Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail) and e Ga ers (the

story of Mick McCarthy, Roy Keane and Saipan). He was writing a short humorous column, ‘ e Diary of a Schools Rugby Player’, which rapidly became the most-read element of the Sunday Tribune. It moved from inside the sports section to the back page of the sports section and then to the main paper. While two volumes of the columns had been published by the Tribune, we saw much more potential. Editing to create an overall narrative, and adding illustrations by the hugely talented Alan Clarke, the Ross phenomenon was born: over 50,000 copies of each book in the series (now with another publisher, unfortunately) has sold, and the column remains a major feature of the Irish Times Saturday edition to this day.

In the humour area, we also found success with the Feckin’ series. ese books are a collection of Irish humour written and illustrated by Colin Murphy and Donal O’Dea, who were working in advertising agencies. e proposal for the rst book arrived in the post, complete with cover design and concept. We published numerous books in the series.

Author Paul Howard and then editorial director Ide ní Laoghaire.

e Feckin’ Book of Everything Irish: A Gansey-Load of Deadly Craic for Cute Hoors and Bowsies was named Best Humor Book at the 2007 Independent Book Publishers’ Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards in New York. We had sold rights to an American publisher, following a chance meeting at the BEA, the main American book fair. e US publisher asked me what I was going to do if we won. I replied, ‘We are not going to win.’ en we heard our name called out and we were on the stage. ‘We had a feckin’ marvellous journey and we are feckin’ delighted with this award.’

ere have been twenty Feckin books; it’s a series people seem to buy for their dads!

2004: Something Beginning With P: New Poems from Irish Poets –

Edited by Seamus Cashman.

Illustrated by Corrina Askin, Alan Clarke & Emma Byrne

We had a big dream: to create a children’s poetry anthology like those we’d seen in other European countries. is would involve commissioning one hundred of our most acclaimed poets to write a children’s poem and have each one specially illustrated. Easy to say, but di cult to achieve. Michael tasked Seamus Cashman, poet, editor, founder of Wolfhound Press and friend, with editing it. is involved asking established poets, like Seamus Heaney, Rita Ann Higgins, Brendan Kennelly, omas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Dennis O’Driscoll to write specially for children, sometimes for the rst time.

In his introduction, Cashman says:

‘I enjoyed commissioning the poems for this collection more than I could have imagined. at legendary standing army of Irish poets – famous, infamous and unknowns – proved, much to my relief, to be more than a wild bunch, goodhumoured professionals, ready to have a go.’

For illustration, Michael wanted something beautiful, original and child-centred, and three illustrators came on board. Alan Clark: mischievous, rude and brilliant. Corrina Askin: blazing colour, action-packed and childish fun. Emma Byrne, our inhouse designer, contributed illustration, brilliant typography and overall delicious design. Poetry Ireland helped with the book’s promotion and launch.

e cost of publishing was considerable. We were thrilled to receive funding from the Arts Council and huge support from RTÉ Education, who bought a substantial number of copies for schools in Ireland. In 2008, the paperback edition was published.

‘A dream for parents hoping to inspire a love of poetry, and a book that will never be outgrown.’ Irish Independent

2005: Alice Again – Judi Curtin

One of our lynchpin editors at the press, Helen Carr, has a longtime creative relationship with one of our most successful children’s authors. She is best placed to write about Judi.

‘One of the rst books I edited when I started working as an editor with e O’Brien Press was Judi Curtin’s Alice Again, her second book about best friends Alice & Megan. Judi was being

described as “Ireland’s answer to Jacqueline Wilson”, probably because both writers deal sensitively with the issues facing young readers and are set in the everyday, modern world. I’d read her rst book, Alice Next Door, and loved it, so I was looking forward to working with Judi, and she didn’t disappoint.

‘Working with Judi on her Alice & Megan and Eva books has been a high point in my working life and a real pleasure. Judi develops her characters and their relationships over the course of the series; she’s dealt with friendship issues, parental separation, bullying, seeing beyond outward appearances, the recession, the beginnings of boy/girl relationships – and handled them all with a light touch so the books never risk becoming “issue” books. And they’re funny – Eva and Megan are great narrators of the two series, and the cast of supporting characters bring a lot of humour to the books too.

‘Judi’s are the kind of books I would have loved to read as a child, and she has many happy readers. e books have been bestsellers and Books of the Month, and are translated into many languages.’

2006: History’s Daughter: A Memoir from the Only Child of Terence MacSwiney – Máire MacSwiney Brugha

It was a privilege to publish the autobiography of Máire MacSwiney Brugha, daughter of the Irish republican hero Terence MacSwiney. Terence became Lord Mayor of Cork after the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain by the British, and later died on hunger strike in

London’s Brixton Prison in 1920, creating a worldwide sensation. Máire was just three.

Her mother, Muriel Murphy MacSwiney, was from the wealthy Murphy brewing family. She, uncharacteristically, became a socialist activist.

Young Máire spent her early years in various European schools, and lived in Switzerland during the rise of fascism. She was fourteen years old when she rst came to Ireland, where she later married Ruairí Brugha, whose father, Cathal, was a leader in the War of Independence.

Michael remembered meeting Máire when she was eighty- ve and almost blind. ‘She had a feisty, lively curiosity and was very engaged in the idea of creating her biography. Her daughterin-law Catherine played a major role in opening up her dramatic story, and also arranging and selecting photographs from the family’s fabulous collection and elsewhere.’ e book was rst published in hardback in 2005, and in paperback in 2006.

Title page of History’s Daughter, signed by Máire MacSwiney Brugha, daughter of the Irish republican hero Terence MacSwiney.

2007: e Story of Ireland –

Brendan O’Brien

is was one of those big, mad, ambitious ideas. Just think of the pitch: ‘Let’s do a history of Ireland for children from the Stone Age to now. It has to be accurate and entertaining, and child-friendly, heavily illustrated with photographs and lots of cartoons. And it has to cover everything from the way people lived to the major historical characters, both North and South, including the Great Famine, 1916 and the Northern Troubles, in a fair and balanced way. And let’s do it as a large-format hardback.’ e author, Brendan O’Brien, had written books before but never for children, so there was a huge learning curve for all of us. is type of book takes a long time, and a huge team. e author’s contract was signed in 2003, and the book was published four years later, in 2007. We commissioned the wonderful Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny to do the illustration; eight di erent artists took on various sections. And resources went into sourcing photographs and commissioning maps.

We are very grateful to the Arts Council, the Heritage Council and the Dublin Airport Authority, who helped make this huge project a reality. e time and energy invested was all worthwhile when the book won at the Irish Book Awards and sold over sixty thousand copies between its three editions: the original large hardback, a large paperback and a smaller format hardback for the tourist market; the book remains an essential stock items for all bookshops in Ireland.

2008: Exploring the Book of Kells –

George Otto Simms

Exploring the Book of Kells was rst published in 1992 in a hardback edition.

is friendly introduction to one of Ireland’s main treasures was still selling strongly years later, but we felt it was time that it was available in paperback. We discussed the huge range of tourists who visited it and, with our experience of multilingual editions of e Golden Book of Ireland, decided it was time that we made it available in a range of languages. After consulting with the Library Shop in Trinity College, we determined to aim for German, French and, in 2008, Japanese. We have since added Spanish to the roster of languages for this unique celebration of Celtic art.

2009: Blood Upon the Rose: Easter

1916, e Rebellion at Set Ireland

Free – Gerry Hunt

Emma Byrne, our design manager, is best placed to write about our departure into graphic novels.

‘As a graphic designer, I was always drawn (forgive the pun) to comics and graphic novels. In college, my degree thesis was about graphic novels and their ability to communicate more than just “light funnies”.

‘I came across Street of Dublin by Gerry Hunt one day in Sub City, that beloved shop of the comic fan, and I loved the look and feel of it – the art, the production, the paper. Gerry Hunt really brought the place to life – and gave it fantastic atmosphere.

‘I showed the graphic novel to Michael O’Brien and he was equally impressed, so we arranged to meet Gerry. From this meeting, the great idea came about to create a graphic novel version of the 1916 Easter Rising. By taking a sensitive episode from our history and retelling it through the medium of the comic book, it takes on a di erent guise. It makes it more approachable to those reluctant to read weightier volumes. And the medium of sequential narrative also makes a di cult subject more accessible. is was innovative Irish publishing.

‘We have since worked on other graphic novels, including At War With the Empire, about the Irish War of Independence.’

2010: A Coward if I Return, A Hero if I Fall: Stories of Irishmen in World War I – Neil Richardson

When Michael O’Brien rst met Neil Richardson, he was a teenager at a creative writing project at Tallaght library in west Dublin. He was writing ction but was also interested in military history. When he discovered that his great-grandfather had been a soldier in the First World War, he was intrigued and decided to research this little-heralded area in Irish history.

Neil contacted the public through newspapers and other media, asking for memorabilia, diaries, medals and letters from those who had relatives who had fought in the First World War. e overwhelming response convinced him to write a book of rst-hand accounts, framed by historical background, re ecting the bravery of the soldiers but also Ireland’s ambivalent attitude to their sons donning British uniforms. e war had coincided with the rise in Irish republican activity, including the historic 1916 Rising and the desire for independence from the British Empire.

At the prestigious Irish Book Awards, Neil’s book was up against acclaimed names in his non- ction category. When he won, he was genuinely shocked – but he managed to deliver a stirring speech to the audiences at the venue and watching on television.

2011: Sally Go Round the Stars: Favourite Rhymes from an Irish Childhood – Sarah Webb and Claire Ranson. Illustrated by Steve McCarthy

Sallly Go Round the Stars became another favourite, with brilliant artwork commissioned by design manager Emma Byrne: ‘When this manuscript came to me, I had great fun rereading all those rhymes I learned as a kid.

Everything from “ ree Blind Mice” to “Are You Right ere, Michael?”.

I worked with authors Sarah Webb and Claire Ranson on their inspired choice of rhymes to nd an illustrator to give the book a

completely fresh and non-traditional look.

‘ ere are di erent websites that I peruse for new talent, as well as getting illustrators’ portfolios in through the post. I also search through blogs, and it was here that I found Steve McCarthy. I found his work fresh, funny and innovative. I thought he could really reinvent these classic rhymes, while still being true to them.

‘ e authors liked the sound of Steve, and a brilliant collaboration was born; the gamble paid o in spades. ese cleverly selected, time-trusted rhymes had a whole new set of clothes, at times funny, sad, quiet, messy, colourful, but always engaging. Favourites include the cutaway drawing for “ ere Was an Old Woman”, which should be disgusting but is endishly funny; the various characters, animals and superheroes that appear in “ e Wheels on the Bus”; and the simple but dynamic drawing for “I’m a Little Teapot”.

‘Steve’s drawings had a touch of the surreal about them, making them fun for adults and children alike. e book was nominated for the Bord Gáis Children’s Book of the Year.’

2012: Dubliners – James Joyce

Dublin’s innovative One City, One Book festival is a city-wide celebration of reading and has been running since 2006. Selected by the city libraries, a single book is the focus for a month of readings, talks, music and a myriad of other events. We were immensely proud to be the rst Irish publisher to feature when, in 2012, our edition

of James Joyce’s Dubliners was chosen as the key title.

ere are so many editions of Joyce’s works available that we felt we needed our edition to really stand out. So many ‘classic’ editions have small, cramped type that we felt this was an opportunity to create a beautiful edition which would cry out to be read! Emma Byrne’s modern type design and the use of old photographs inside, as well as a great cover, make this an object to treasure. We were delighted when John Boyne agreed to write a new, and very personal, introduction.

Our Joycean adventure continued when, in 2013, we published a new edition of Ulysses (both in hardback and paperback, as well as a special limited edition) and James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner, a spectacular graphic novel biography of Ireland’s most famous writer.

2013: Arimathea – Frank McGuinness

Frank McGuinness is a world-renowned playwright and the writer of several lm scripts, including Dancing at Lughnasa; he has also published several anthologies of poetry.

Michael rst met the young Frank in the early 1980s when ‘he worked as an editor in my good friend Seamus Cashman’s publishing company, Wolfhound Press.

‘Frank was impressive, with his aming orange hair, strong voice and incredible focus. During that period, his rst play, e Factory Girls, was produced in the Abbey eatre to great acclaim.

‘When Steve MacDonogh, a friend and the publisher at

Brandon, died, in 2010, we acquired the Brandon list and began a new wave of ction with Brandon as an imprint of O’Brien. Frank was Professor of English in University College Dublin, and I asked him to help me develop Brandon Fiction, to suggest authors and create an ethos and strategy.

‘We met in his local pub to discuss ction publishing, and it transpired that he had recently written a novel. I was immediately excited.

‘When I read the manuscript, I was entranced by his unforgettable voices, his dexterity, the wide cast of characters and his originality. Arimathea was shortlisted for both Eason Novel of the Year 2013 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2014.

‘ e publication was supported by the Arts Council. We had a major launch, with an impressive literary and arts audience, for the Brandon Fiction imprint at Dublin’s National Gallery, where we celebrated Frank’s Arimathea and Mary Morrissy’s story of enigmatic beauty Bella Casey, sister to the famed playwright Sean O’Casey, and her tragic life in 1916 Dublin, e Rising of Bella Casey.’

Michael, standing proudly in front of a poster for Frank McGuinness’s Arimathea, at the Frankfurt Bookfair stand at the end of set-up day, 2013.

2014: e Bloodied

Field:

Croke Park, Sunday 21 November 1920 –

Michael Foley

Ivan O’Brien describes how ‘we had already published Michael Foley’s Kings of September: e Day O aly Denied Kerry Five in a Row, which won the BoyleSports Sports Book of the Year award in 2007 and knew that he was a really classy writer, when he proposed a book about Bloody Sunday.

‘ is genre-crossing book combined sport with history: ‘on 21 November 1920, British troops opened re at a match in Croke Park in one of the de ning moments in Ireland’s independence struggle. We signed a contract in 2011 with an optimistic publication date in 2012. As the book grew and research continued, it was delayed until the 2014 autumn publication list.

‘By December, we knew we had a hit on our hands as every sports journalist in the country started raving about it! e stock vanished overnight; thankfully a Dublin-based printer was able to do a rush reprint in one week. ere were tales of locust-like crowds emptying boxes when they landed on shop oors before the books ever made their way to the shelves. e Bloodied Field deservedly won the GAA’s MacNamee book award the next year.’

2015: A Dublin Fairytale –

Nicola Colton

Emma Byrne says, ‘As the O’Brien Press designer, I am sent many gorgeous illustrator submissions and portfolios weekly, mostly artists looking for work illustrating covers or interiors.

‘Nicola Colton’s portfolio was slightly di erent; one of the pieces was a little girl in a red coat walking around the streets of Dublin. It struck me as visually exciting, and it was great to see something of this standard, celebrating home: not London, or New York, but Dublin.

‘I speci cally remember sitting at my desk in the editorial o ce and asking my colleague, senior editor Helen Carr, “Do you think we could turn this into a book?”

‘ e rest is history. What emerged was A Dublin Fairytale, a Little Red Riding Hood story set on the streets of Dublin, which became a bestseller, selling over 30,000 copies to date. It also led to a series of other books that celebrate Irish places, not just in text, but visually. A Cork Fairytale, A Galway Fairytale and A Limerick Fairytale have become popular titles.’

2016:

e Moon Spun Round:

W.B. Yeats for Children

– Edited by Noreen Doody.

Illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald

Senior editor Susan Houlden had a particular a nity with this luminous work. ‘When my now-adult daughter was in primary school, she chose “ e Lake Isle of Innisfree” as her favourite poem, imagining herself in “the bee-loud glade” and illustrating the poem with her young imagination. So, when e O’Brien Press sought to publish a children’s book of Yeats’s poetry, I was delighted to work with Dr Noreen Doody, our design manager Emma Byrne and her inspired choice of emerging artistic talent, Shona Shirley Macdonald.

‘Noreen was passionate about bringing Yeats’s work to a younger readership. is sumptuously illustrated book complements his carefully selected works: poems, stories, letters, memories of childhood, and his daughter Anne’s memories of childhood.

‘Shona went on to publish another picture book (as both author and artist) with us in 2018 – e Pooka Party, which was selected for the IBBY Honour List 2020, and nominated for an Irish Book Award 2018, CBI Award 2019 and LAI Award 2019.’

2017: Home For Christmas –

Alice Taylor

Our design manager Emma Byrne has built a special relationship with one of our best-loved authors.

‘Alice Taylor is always a joy to work with. When Brandon came under the stewardship of e O’Brien Press, one of the ways to make the Alice Taylor package di erent was to add images to the books. It was a gamble, being more expensive to produce, but it has proved a popular decision.

‘ e rst book, As Time Stood Still, was in black and white, as was Do You Remember? and the reissue of To School rough the Fields, but after that we moved to colour.

‘And what better way to celebrate Alice’s Christmas than in full colour! It helped to emphasise the warmth and sense of togetherness that was in the text.

‘One of Alice’s great gifts is the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and I think the imagery in the books makes it all the more real.’

2018: Blazing a Trail: Irish Women Who Changed the World – Sarah Webb. Illustrated by Lauren O’Neill

Our Rights Director Kunak McGann describes what a wonderful success this book has been for e O’Brien Press, winning an Irish Book Award and ying o shelves in bookshops.

‘When Sarah Webb proposed a children’s book celebrating the most fascinating, pioneering and inspiring Irish women across history, we loved it from the start.

‘Sarah has spent her life championing Irish children’s books and has penned children’s ction and non- ction, and edited numerous collections of stories, poems and nursery rhymes.

‘For this book, she told the stories of twenty-eight women, from su ragists, artists and scientists to explorers, rebels and sporting legends. She included Irish icons like Granuaile, Countess Markievicz and Sonia O’Sullivan but also lesser known gures like the pilot Lady Heath who ew solo from Cape Town to London, fearless gold prospector Nellie Cashman and Aleen Cust, Ireland’s rst woman vet.

‘A vital element of the book was pairing Sarah’s clever storytelling with the artwork of Lauren O’Neill. Lauren created striking portraits of the women blended with symbols of their achievements, resulting in a classic-looking book with a modern twist.’

2019: On e Banks of the Dodder: Rathgar & Churchtown, An

Illustrated History – Ged Walsh

Ivan O’Brien recalls how ‘we signed a contract with Ged Walsh for a book on south Dublin townships in 2008. It sat in our “to be developed” column until Ged encouraged Michael O’Brien to do “a few drawings” of locations in Rathgar and Churchtown that would feature in the book and the project picked up momentum.

‘Michael loved Ged’s company as they walked, took photographs and drew. In the end, there were nearly seventy new drawings in the book. It was a family a air as Michael’s son Eoin edited the book. Michael was always engaged with the local business and residents’ associations in Rathgar, where he lived and where the company’s o ces are located, and many readers clearly shared a love of the area. When the book was published in 2019, with an exhibition of the drawings, the rst edition soon sold out, with an updated edition published in 2021.’

2020: Queen of Coin and Whispers –

Helen Corcoran

Helen Carr, senior editor, tells us how as a reader she has always loved an immersive, sweeping story and how she responded to Helen Corcoran’s novels.

‘Queen Of Coin and Whispers tells the epic

story of Lia, a young, newly crowned queen tasked with turning her realm’s fortunes around, and Xania, a courtier bent on avenging her own father’s death. Xania becomes Lia’s spymaster, and against all the odds, the two young women fall in love.

‘Queen of Coin and Whispers was not the rst LGBTQ+ novel published by e O’Brien Press, but as a fantasy novel, it was uniquely placed to centre the experience of characters often ignored or pushed to supporting roles. In this world, Lia, Xania and the other characters face many challenges, trials and dangers – but their genders and sexuality aren’t among them.

‘ e book was released in summer 2020, in the very early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were unable to have the usual launch, readings and in-person publicity, but this compelling book still found many readers, some perhaps seeking escape from lockdown and strange times.

‘Describing the book, Helen Corcoran said, “I wrote Queen of Coin and Whispers for me: the teenager who loved fantasy … and was searching for a mirror amid the magic, the dragons and the werewolves.”

‘All of us at e O’Brien Press are so proud of the book and its sequel, Daughter of Winter and Twilight, and hope they will provide a mirror for readers to see themselves in for years to come.’

2021: What Love Looks Like – Jarlath Gregory

Ivan O’Brien continues to honour Michael’s legacy and reminds us of how ‘our publishing often challenges the cultural mores of a Catholic-dominated Ireland, for example, Facing Up to AIDS (1989) and When Love Comes to Town (1993, the year homosexuality was

decriminalised in Ireland). e country had evolved to become much more multicultural and progressive by the time Jarlath Gregory wrote What Love Looks Like: a coming-of-age story, featuring gay sex, drag queens, transgender people, racism and online dating, which re ects a country unrecognisable from when e O’Brien Press started in 1974. Sensitive, compassionate and very funny, this is the type of book that is essential, allowing readers to see themselves on the pages and understand that being di erent is less scary than they thought.’

2022: Ash + Salt: From Survival to Empowerment after Sexual Assault –Sarah Grace

Kunak McGann believes that ‘there are some books we publish that are so important it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t publish them. One of those books is Ash + Salt by Sarah Grace. In 2019, Sarah was violently assaulted in her own home. She su ered unimaginable trauma that night. But her treatment by our archaic justice system was to make things even worse: from the utter devastation of discovering that her private therapy notes were to be made available to her attacker, to the horror of having to testify sitting just feet from him in the courtroom.

‘In Ireland, nearly half of survivors of sexual assault don’t tell a single person. e shame involved is overwhelming. We approached Sarah to write her story because we knew she was articulate and brave and wanted to raise these issues publicly. We knew she was determined to help others. We knew she had important things to say.

‘All through the trial and its aftermath, Sarah had been mentally composing a checklist for survivors – what they should and shouldn’t do when navigating their way through the justice system – and that checklist evolved into an extraordinary book. It’s not just a book that guides survivors, their friends and family through the process or a critique of a legal system that is outmoded; it is a call to action to change how we – all of us – think and talk about sexual assault.’

2023: In Between Worlds: e Journey of the Famine Girls – Nicola Pierce

‘Michael O’Brien was a passionate believer in bringing history to children in novel form,’ says senior editor Susan Houlden.

‘From Nicola Pierce’s very rst bestselling children’s book, Spirit of the Titanic in 2011, Michael knew he had a gifted storyteller on his hands.

‘As Nicola’s editor, I have had the privilege of working with her for fourteen years. Her powerful and captivating children’s novels also include City of Fate, an anti-war novel of young soldiers, set in Stalingrad during the Second World War and Chasing Ghosts (2020), the haunting true story of the ill-fated 1845 Franklin

expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Nicola has also published history books for adults with e O’Brien Press: Titanic: True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew and Legacy (2018) and O’Connell Street: e History and Life of Dublin’s Iconic Street (2021).

‘Every time a manuscript by Nicola appears in my mail, I know I am about to be transported to another time, another place, and I am going to meet real and inspiring young characters. And at some stage, there will be tears, not from our work, but from the arresting stories that ow from Nicola’s spellbinding storytelling.

‘In Between Worlds follows Maggie and over a hundred and ninety other girls, who nd themselves eeing famine-torn Ireland in 1849 on board the omas Arbuthnot, bound for Australia. e story of these young girls sent to Australia was new to me. We see how easy it is to be moving through life, poor but happy, until disaster strikes, and life becomes all about survival. e girls encounter hardship, grief, drama, but also warmth and beauty, and we see lifelong friendships forming as they draw on their courage, striking out for a better life in a strange new world. ere are resonances in this special novel for all migrants. is novel justi es Michael O’Brien’s belief in the importance of telling stories from our history – we need to know who we are and the stories of those who have gone before us.’

2024: Braids Take a Day – Zainab Boladale

Always striving to publish new voices, senior editor Helen Carr tells us how ‘Zainab Boladale has written a fantastic book, full of warmth and heart, and it was such a pleasure working with her on her rst novel, bringing a diverse, own-voice Irish story to life.

Zainab is a presenter on RTÉ’s Nationwide. In 2017, she made her TV debut as a presenter on the RTÉ’s children’s programme, news2day, becoming the rst Afro-Irish news presenter on RTÉ.

‘Braids Take a Day, with its beautiful cover by Grace Enemaku, follows

Nigerian-Irish teenager Abidemi Benson, who has just done her Leaving Cert in Ennistymon, through a summer where she learns about herself, her friends, her family and what she really wants from life.’

2024: e Golden Hare –Paddy Donnelly

Paddy Donnelly’s rst book with e O’Brien Press as author and illustrator, e Vanishing Lake, features Meara and her grandad. e Golden Hare is a second tale for our intrepid pair, re ecting Paddy’s combined loves of myth and nature, with a surprising nd-the-hare element.

His hugely popular Fox & Son Tailers (also published by e O’Brien Press) was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2022, and won the Literacy Association of Ireland Biennial Children’s Book Award in 2023. His editor Susan Houlden says, ‘Paddy is simply a rising star in the children’s book world.’

A Few Final Words – Unfinished Thoughts

People think that publishers sit back and wait for books and talent to arrive in the door. Some books do come to us that way, to the unsolicited slush pile or in later years through Culture Night’s ‘Pitch Perfect’ event. Books also come through agents. But many books are commissioned; this is especially true for smaller publishers. A huge number of the books published by e O’Brien Press have come from in-house ideas, brainstorming with existing authors or actively seeking out new authors to marry to edgling ideas.

Furthering the careers of our authors has always been taken very seriously at the press. When an author has had one success, it is wonderful to be able to follow on with other books from that author and build their name. Name recognition is one of the most important elements in selling books.

Members of our team often come up with ideas and get me to make the call to the relevant person because of my longevity and my name recognition. Sometimes there can be competition with

other Irish publishers for an author. I have always enjoyed this. Many of us in the trade were both best friends and competitors as part of a network. If another company had a great success, we were all delighted for them – and we might learn lessons from it. We might even enter the same publishing area. I have never worried about what others are publishing – good luck to them all!

Michael O’Brien

Afterword – Ivan O’Brien

THE O’BRIEN PRESS TEAM

Michael was a born leader. He didn’t know how to be a part of an organisation in any way other than driving it through the sheer force of his personality! It didn’t always make for easy times, but it was rarely boring. However, he balanced this singular drive with a true and genuine respect for the views of those he worked with. e level of loyalty, both to him personally and to the company, that this generated is immense, and has been a huge component of our success over many years.

Allied to that, he understood that there were areas over which he knew little or nothing, and was very happy to delegate those to others, and to trust them to do their job well. is trust and delegation applied particularly to editing. He always believed that ‘a good edit’ could iron out the issues with a manuscript, however complex they were. A voracious reader, he would read and comment on manuscripts, often vehemently, and often directly with the author. He had a real skill in reading challenging manuscripts for potential libel and other legal issues, but he didn’t presume to do the editing himself. Unusually, we have always worked with an

e O’Brien Press regularly held garden parties when the company was based in Victoria Road. From left: Michael O’Brien, Rachel Pierce, Lynn Pierce, Catriona Magner, Damien Keenan, Chenile Keogh (seated), Mary Webb, in July 2000.

e O’Brien Press team at our twenty- fth anniversary celebrations in 1999. From left: Frances Power, Ivan O’Brien, Mary Webb, Charlie Bateman, Eanya Gallagher, Dara O’Brien, Michael O’Brien, Chenile Keogh, Ide ní Laoghaire, Barbara (surname unknown), Mary Campbell. From left at front: Brenda Boyne, Eoin O’Brien, Heather Purcell, Neasa ní Chianáin.

in-house model, with nearly all editing done by sta , rather than freelancers. While nancially this is riskier, it prioritises author care and builds loyalty and ownership on the part of the editors.

We have also nearly always had in-house sales, publicity and marketing teams. Core sta members, in particular Brenda Boyne (sales) and Ruth Heneghan (publicity and marketing) and their teams have built and maintained relationships with customers and media that are invaluable, and certainly give great results. In the sales area, a constant emphasis on professionalism – stick to your publication dates, make sure books are available in time, always communicate accurately – has been drilled into the whole team.

With his visual background, Michael put a particular focus on design, illustration, typography and packaging. It is hard to overstate the impact that his collaborative relationship with Emma Byrne, our design manager, has played in the development of beautiful books that sell year after year after year.

Michael was a social learner, meaning that he worked out what he thought about things himself by having long (and at times circular) conversations with key colleagues. Two key players stand out: Ide ní Laoghaire was at the heart of our editorial policy for many years, and Michael trusted her judgement. And Kunak McGann, the ‘Michael whisperer’ for over twenty years, whose contributions across so many areas of the company have been immense.

TECHNOLOGY

Michael might not have really understood what all the machines in the o ce did, but he was always keen for the company to be an early adopter. e ways that books are produced have changed

beyond all recognition in the last fty years, and he was always keen to experiment with new technologies, conscious that the new ways of working were usually more cost e cient. We moved very early to desktop publishing in the late 1980s, mainly using PCs rather than the then-ubiquitous Apple Macintosh computers, largely for cost reasons. We bought and used A4 and A3 ‘Genius’ monitors, and invested in desktop printers that would produce camera-ready copy, or CRC, for sending to printers.

e obrien.ie internet domain was secured, and our computers were networked, with email for all sta only a few years later. Our rst transactional website went live in 1997 and broadband speeds have been increased whenever possible. e move from having international couriers collecting printed pages or physical lithographic lm to bring to printers to le delivery via FTP has made the whole process cheaper, faster and more reliable. ere were some errors made along the way, but Michael remained in favour of innovation.

ere are some downsides to working on computers. One of the joys in Michael’s life was working with artists, particularly on cover art. ere are lots of beautiful paintings on the walls of the o ce and in our archive, commissioned work for covers and interiors.

Today, artwork is nearly all created (or at least nished) on computers, so there is no real original to frame.

PUBLISHING STRATEGY

Publishers have always worked on tight margins, and Michael often bemoaned the small size of Ireland and how di cult it was to sell enough books here to build a sound commercial base. Our

approach has been to balance risk between higher-pro le books (largely for adults) that target the bestseller list with titles that can have extended shelf-lives, often away from the high-turnover world of the bookshop.

e O’Brien Press publications in the 1970s and 1980s were eclectic, re ecting both Michael’s personal interests, particularly relating to Irish heritage of many types, but also just trying things to see what would nd a market. e change to a more strategic approach can really be dated to the publication of Under the Hawthorn Tree in 1990, which brought with it the realisation that we could (and should) build a literature for Irish children.

e seasonal nature of book publishing, with a huge proportion of sales being made in the last couple of months of the year, is very challenging. Needing turnover in the rst half of the year, we identi ed tourism as a potential market and worked with CE Bonechi in Italy to create Irish titles in their hugely popular Golden Book series. Published in English, French, German and Italian in 1998 (and subsequently in Spanish, Polish and Russian), e Golden Book of Ireland was a huge hit. We repackaged many of our earlier books on Ireland’s islands in more visitor-friendly forms and developed many other books in this area. During the 2008/9 economic crisis, these books continued to sell while the local market collapsed. Many of these titles are expensive to develop and can take years to earn back the initial investment, but Michael’s philosophy to develop longer-term books has driven this area of the company. Our joint marketing operation with Gill (‘Tourist Books Express’) has been important in building a strong customer base for tourist titles, providing more predictable turnover in the summer months.

e sudden death of Steve MacDonagh in November 2010 left his publishing company, Brandon, in a perilous state. E ectively a one-man band at that point, it could easily have collapsed, and all the books would have been lost. It was a hugely complex operation, but there were both personal and business reasons to save what we could and keep publishing titles under the Brandon imprint. With support from the Arts Council, we launched some strong general ction titles, as well as reviving the publishing of bestselling author Alice Taylor. Michael was hugely invested in the Brandon project from the start and very proud to have been able to preserve his friend’s legacy in print.

It is also challenging to publish potentially less commercial new children’s authors and illustrators in a market as small of Ireland.

e Arts Council of Ireland understand our mission, and their support continues to be important, allowing us to keep pushing the envelope in publishing new novels and picture books.

ere was always a lot of courage in what Michael chose to publish: in the Personal Favourites and Landmark Books chapter,

At Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013, adding Brandon branding to the e O’Brien Press stand.

e O’Brien Press sta on the day in 2023 when each was gifted one of

honouring his

Sheridan,

Harrison,

we have listed the rst gay coming-of-age novel in Ireland (When Love Comes to Town), the rst true crime book ( e General), the rst historical graphic novel (Blood Upon the Rose) and many more. Michael did not like to walk away from a challenge, and he would always come back from book fairs or holidays with loads of (sometimes unworkable) ideas.

While commercial viability was a part of the conversation, Michael was much more interested in following his convictions and passions, and he was very happy to take substantial risks. is was true of his long-term approach to author careers also, where he would keep faith with authors whose work had merit, no matter the sales gures for their rst titles. He also always recognised the importance of the book as a beautiful physical object: he loved a slipcase, a special edition (usually signed and numbered), just the

Michael O’Brien’s paintings,

wishes. From left: Sinéad Lalor, Ruth Henegan, Helen Carr, Brenda Boyne, Bex

Elena Browne, Emma Byrne (at back), Kasandra Ferguson, Aoife

Kunak McGann, Susan Houlden, Nicola Reddy, Laura Feeney.

right paper and a lovely cover with the right combination of foils, laminates and embossing.

It is notable how many speeches at book launches since Michael’s death have begun with ‘this was a book that Michael was really invested in’. To give an idea of his eclectic interests, these include Carsten Krieger and Richard Creagh’s Ireland’s Islands (where he insisted that Ireland’s Eye should feature); e Granite Coast by his old friend Peter Pearson, a history of Dún Laoghaire, where he sailed for many year; Nicola Pierce’s historical novel In Between Worlds – he always supported her writing; country singer Sandy Kelly’s memoir In My Own Words; A Ramble About Tallaght by Albert Perris, featuring many of his illustrations, and e Brutish Empire: Four Centuries of Colonial Atrocities by Des Ekin. He just loved a great story well told, and he was always con dent that there would be an readership for books such as these.

COLLABORATION

Michael put substantial work into things that were not always directly of bene t to the company, but were important for the whole cultural ecosystem in Ireland. We are a small country, and most of the publishers here are small. e fact that over 80 per cent of the books sold in Ireland originate from abroad (mainly from the UK) means that we are not really in direct competition and usually have a lot to gain from working together.

Michael sat on the board and was President of CLÉ, now Publishing Ireland, and encouraged me to do the same.

He was ambitious for export sales and drove a range of sales and marketing collaborations with other Irish publishers in

Britain (e.g. PointsWest) and the USA (e.g. Irish American Book Company), in particular. Selling International rights involves building and maintaining a substantial network of contact with agents and publishers worldwide; rights trading has always been core to our mission. Continually aiming for the highest international standards, Michael took the degree to which O’Brien Press books have been translated into other languages as a measure of our quality.

Once we became a recognised children’s publisher, he threw himself into building a range of organisations. One of the key players in the founding of an Irish arm of IBBY ( e International Board on Books for Young People), and a vocal presence at their international conferences, he also published A Bridge of Children’s Books, the English-language edition of its founder Jella Lepman’s memoir. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Irish Children’s Book Trust, which has since evolved to become Children’s Books Ireland (CBI). He received two awards in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Irish children’s literature: from CBI, who awarded him their Summer School Award of the Decade in 2006, and posthumously from the Literature Association of Ireland in 2023.

One key business partnership has been with Gill Books. Our distribution has been handled by them since the sudden collapse of Irish Bookhandling (a distribution business set up with Wolfhound and Dolmen) in 1986. As Gill & Macmillan, they had just built a new warehouse and had the capacity to take us on. e O’Brien Press has been their largest client since, and they have always been rock-solid partners, taking on the credit risk and e ciently looking

after over 500,000 volumes for us. e cooperation is multifaceted and we have had a joint sales (and, initially, merchandising) operation in the tourist trade every year.

Within the Irish publishing industry, there was also considerable informal collaboration, primarily within a group who became known as the ‘Elder Lemons’. Seamus Cashman (Wolfhound Press, Dublin), John Spillane (Mercier Press, Cork), Anne Tannahill (Blacksta Press, Belfast) and Michael were often joined by Lorraine Fannin and Marion Sinclair from Publishing Scotland. For business and social reasons, this group of friends would meet regularly, sharing support and information.

From the earliest days of the company, Michael recognised how important individual booksellers were to the success of the whole industry. In 1995, he commissioned a beautiful bronze sculpture from Rowan Gillespie, to be presented annually to the Bookseller

e ‘Elder Lemons’: Seamus Cashman (Wolfhound Press), Anne Tannahill (Blacksta Press), John Spillane (Mercier Press) and Michael O’Brien.

of the Year at the CLÉ conference. While other awards have come and gone, nearly thirty years later this award has been a constant presence and carries huge prestige – and means that an O’Brien Press lea et and logo is on every table at the dinner, every year, of course!

LEGACY

From a car full of books that were produced around the kitchen table in 1974 to a well-established and stable company with over two thousand books published and a strong international reputation half a century later, Michael leaves a very signi cant legacy.

His strong belief in the importance of the cultural independence of small countries like Ireland never wavered. For a man who fell into publishing almost by accident, he was proud of the role of e O’Brien Press in this culture, and the fact that the company is independent and family owned. Michael truly valued and respected his colleagues and the commitment of the whole team to producing books that are both important and beautiful.

Michael’s eightieth birthday party in September 2021. With Svetlana, extended family and Seamus Cashman, because publishers are family too!

Ivan and Michael O’Brien, being watched over by Michael’s paintings of his father, omas O’Brien, and his beloved wife, Svetlana, in 2010.

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