It is 5 a.m. and I am sitting at the kitchen table, my jacket and bow tie abandoned somewhere in the hall, far too wired to sleep. A few hours ago, at the An Post Irish Book Awards, Chapters was named Bookshop of the Year. I should be in bed. Instead I am drinking tea and trying to make sense of a night – and a three-and-a-half-year journey – that still does not feel entirely real.

When we first made the shortlist, someone asked if I had a speech written and I said absolutely not, that would jinx it. In my head I thought, if by some miracle we do win, I will get up there and talk complete rubbish and everyone will politely clap while thinking, “He owns a bookshop and cannot string a sentence together.”

But as the night got closer, I changed my mind. Win or lose, we were always coming to that room. I was going to be there with my wife and children; with my best friend and business partner of over thirty years, Kevin, and his children; with Sara, our inspiring, warm, phenomenal manager; with David, our Secondhand supremo; with Martin, who does his best to keep the chaos in some kind of order; with as many of the rest of the team as we could bring; and with Willie and Ger Kinsella, who founded Chapters forty-three years ago and quietly wove it into the life of this city. That felt like something that deserved words.

Because to understand what this award means, you really have to go back to the moment it nearly ended.

“Would you buy Chapters?”

Four years ago, Chapters was facing into what everyone thought would be its last Christmas. Willie rang us just before he went on national radio to announce his retirement and we asked him, could it not be rescued? The reply I’d have only sold it to you and Kevin!

We said yes the way you say yes to winning the lottery. Lovely idea. Totally theoretical.

When Willie said he wanted one last Christmas, we laughed and thought, “He will get the bug again, it will never actually close.” Chapters had always been there. It was part of how people gave directions in Dublin. It was stitched into student memories and rainy Saturdays and pay-day treats. The idea of it simply stopping felt unimaginable.

But it did not quietly go away. In January 2022 the doors closed. The shelves were empty. The stockrooms were gutted. The lights went off. Only then did it properly hit us that Willie really was going to retire and enjoy life with his beloved Ger, with Barry and Lauren, and with the smartest, loveliest grandchildren on the planet.

If Chapters was going to reopen, someone else would have to do it.

That someone, apparently, was us.

I would love to say we sat down with a calm, detailed business plan and a five-year strategy. The truth is we had about five minutes of wild staring, followed by six weeks of organised chaos. We scrambled to set up a company, to negotiate with the landlord (who have actually been fantastic), to sort out bank accounts and card machines and contracts. We tried to rehire staff. We hunted for distributors and secondhand stock. We begged and borrowed books from wherever we could find them – some of my shelves at home were emptied. We tried to learn, at speed, what on earth we were supposed to be doing.

Books are heavy. There are a lot of shelves on Parnell Street. I do not think my back has quite forgiven me.

Running a bookshop is romantic until you look at the spreadsheets. Then you discover it is also about margins, freight costs, cashflow, insurance, energy bills, payroll, IT systems and a thousand tiny decisions about which books to take a chance on. From the very beginning, I was clear: if we were going to do this, it had to be sustainable – commercially, environmentally and emotionally. The shop had to pay its way, support its staff, earn the trust of suppliers, and still feel like the Chapters people loved.

The night before

The night before we reopened, we were in the shop until midnight. My wife, my kids, my son down from Belfast with his friends, my nephew and his wife and their kids – every available pair of hands was drafted in. We were wiping shelves, mopping floors, unpacking boxes, wrestling with signage, trying to coax an empty shell back into a bookshop.

We still did not have enough books.

We had more stock than several small bookshops put together, but it was nowhere near enough to fill the barn that is Chapters. The entire second floor had to stay closed, and we shut off a good third of the back of the store just so we could open the doors and not look completely bare. On one day we took delivery of eighteen pallets of books in one go, and even then we did not have enough.

It had been a crazy six weeks of receive in, price, sticker, shelve, wipe, mop, repeat. There were moments when it all felt completely reckless. But there was also this stubborn little belief that if we could just get the doors open, people would come.

On that first morning, they did.

Our first customers were, appropriately enough, Willie and Ger. I still get a lump in my throat thinking about that. The people who had built Chapters in the first place and trusted us with it now walking through the doors of the “new” shop and putting a purchase through the till.

For all our spreadsheets and sleepless nights, that was the real test: could we keep faith with what they had created, and still build a version of Chapters that could survive the next forty years?

The stories that walked back in

After Willie and Ger, more people arrived.

Customers came up on the train from Limerick and down from Donegal just to be there on opening day. A married couple, Karen and Rachel, came in and told us they had their first date in Chapters. Others messaged to say they had got engaged there, or that they used to come in with their parents or grandparents, or that they had brought their children when they were small and now those grown-up children bring them.

That was the moment we really began to understand that Chapters is not just part of our story, or even just part of Dublin’s story. It is part of other people’s lives in ways we had never fully grasped.

The week of the awards, we shared photographs of a couple, Maeve and Adam, who got engaged in the Fantasy section a few days ago, surrounded by their dog and their friends. Adam, from the top of Gardiner Street, has been coming in since he was a child – first with his parents, then by himself and now with his fiancée. Gardiner Street is around the corner, so that made sense. But Maeve is originally from Belfast and had also been coming to Chapters since childhood trips down on the train with her dad.

It was a perfect reminder that Chapters has a history that belongs to so many people, in ways that spill beyond Dublin postcodes and tidy business metrics.

You can count footfall and turnover; you cannot easily count first kisses in the Graphic Novels section or quiet afternoons that got someone through a bad week. But they matter just as much.

What a bookshop really is

In our An Post Bookshop of the Year submission, we were asked to explain what makes Chapters what it is. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer without just waving your arms and saying, “Come in and you will see.”

We wrote about the obvious things:

The mix of new books and secondhand treasures. The tables that hold brand new releases beside battered copies of long out-of-print favourites. The way academic texts sit happily beside romance, fantasy and the odd utterly ridiculous novelty title that no one really needs but everyone has to pick up. We talked about how deliberate that range is – not a random jumble, but a series of choices about what we want to champion, from Irish presses and debuts to cult classics and comfort reads.

We talked about our staff – the people at the heart of it all. Sara, our manager, who stuck with us and taught me the ropes when I knew nothing about book buying. David and Emilie, our encyclopaedic heroes of Secondhand. Martin, who tries valiantly to keep us organised and to make sure the lights stay on and the orders go out. Patricia, who makes sure everyone actually gets paid. And the whole front-of-house and behind-the-scenes team who work so hard to make shopping in Chapters look effortless, when it is anything but.

We talked about community:

The launches and signings, the poetry nights and romantasy events, the school visits and book clubs. The way Parnell Street has become a place where people drop in just to say hello, to browse for half an hour between buses, to meet a friend, to sit on the floor in the children’s section and read with a toddler. We talked about how important it is to us that the shop feels safe and welcoming, especially on Dublin’s north side, where public “third spaces” can feel thin on the ground.

We talked about sustainability:

That running a large secondhand section is not just good for wallets, it is good for the planet. That giving books another life is better than sending them to landfill. That we reuse boxes and packaging, that we think hard about waste, that we have invested in energy efficiency and try to run the shop in ways that are kinder to the environment as well as to readers’ budgets.

And we tried to put into words something bigger:

A bookshop fills a unique space in our society. We had the option to go fully digital. We can all get almost any title delivered to our door the next day. We can read on screens. But a bookshop is not just a delivery mechanism for literature. It is a place.

It is a place where you wander and pick up something you did not know you needed. A place where someone behind the counter says, “You loved that? Try this.” A place where people go on first dates and fiftieth dates. Where teenagers hide from the weather and from their own lives for a while. Where parents bring excited five year olds to choose a birthday book and then, thirty years later, those same five year olds come back with their own children.

You cannot get that in a cardboard box on the doorstep.

The thanks – and the work ahead

Tonight, standing on that stage, all of this condensed into a list of thank yous that never feels long enough.

To our team, who lug boxes, shelve endlessly, recommend brilliantly and keep the whole show on the road.

To our suppliers, who took our calls, backed us when things were tight, and never made us feel foolish for asking daft questions.

To the publishers who gave us a chance and kept supporting us when we were still finding our feet and our figures.

To the writers who added us to their signing routes and trusted us with their launches – including the Queens of Irish commercial fiction, led by the indomitable Patricia Scanlan, who encouraged us to think differently and made us laugh when we badly needed it. That first big event with Patricia, Sheila O’Flanagan, Felicity Hayes-McCoy, Carmel Harrington, Hazel Gaynor, Caroline Grace Cassidy and Ciara Geraghty changed things for us. It made us realise we could do things our own way – that perhaps our customers were different, and that this was a strength, not a problem.

To the Booksellers Association and its members, clever, generous people who share knowledge instead of gatekeeping it.

To Dublin City Council, who looked at a planning application and decided that bookshops matter culturally to this city and they are not in the business of closing them. That decision changed everything.

To Willie and Ger, for building Chapters in the first place, for giving two cheeky kids their first real business opportunity, and for trusting us with Chapters and not to make a haims of it.

To our families, who did not say, “Are you mad?” but “Great, go for it – what can we do to help?” and then rolled up their sleeves and did exactly that.

And above all, to the readers. The ones who have been coming in for decades and the ones who only discovered us last week. The ones who message us lovely things online and the ones who shyly say, “I love this shop” at the till. The ones who travel from Limerick and Donegal and beyond, and the ones who wander in off Parnell Street just to get out of the rain.

You have no idea what this award means to all of us – new Chapters and old – after forty three years.

It belongs to every member of staff who has ever shelved a book in those aisles. It belongs to every customer who has lost an afternoon there, or fallen in love there, or found exactly the right story at exactly the right time.

From the outside, this might look like a fairy tale – big old bookshop saved at the last minute, award on the mantelpiece, happy ending. From where I am sitting at the kitchen table with my lukewarm tea, it feels a bit different. It feels like a responsibility. Our job now is to keep earning this – to keep balancing the romance of a great bookshop with the hard graft and clear-headed decisions that mean we can still be here, paying wages, taking risks on new writers, stacking secondhand tables, and flinging open those doors on Parnell Street for many years to come.

At some point later today I will probably crash spectacularly and need a nap, but right now, at 5 a.m., I am just profoundly, dizzyingly grateful.

Thank you for finding your way back to Chapters. Thank you for making it part of your story. And thank you for letting us keep doing the work we love.

Mick Finucane

 

Chapters Bookstore Staff March 11th 2022- The day we reopened.