TRADE NAMES:Four generations of Duffys have worked in the bookbinding business but the trade in Ireland is facing challenges from a number of sources

THERE WAS a time, centuries of time in fact, when bookbinders were a highly valued and greatly sought-after lot. They're still highly valued but, with technology having its day and the culture of books changing, they're less sought-after, for some things anyway.

"There'll always be work for us," Tom Duffy, a third generation bookbinder familiar with the seed and breed of the trade, assures, "we won't go out of business but we won't be considering expansion either!"

With his brother Patrick (Pat) he owns and works Duffy Bookbinders, a family firm with roots back to his grandfather, also Patrick Duffy, a bookbinder who set the course for four Duffy generations of bookbinders. Tommy Duffy, son of Tom and wife Patricia, flies the flag for today's generation. Tom and Pat, Patricia and Tommy; they're a close, hard working group, and good humoured with it, the Duffys of Duffy Bookbinders, Seville Terrace, Dublin 1.

They've a sense of history too and tell their story well with Tom, for the most part, as spokesman.

"My grandfather, Patrick Duffy, was a bookbinder from Commons Street, just around the corner where the IFSC is now. His father was a seaman; the family are Dubliners from way back. Patricia," his wife and the mother of their children grins, works away and knows what's coming, "was an interruption when she married me. She lived around the corner but her family aren't Dublin."

Patrick Duffy was a member of James Connolly's Citizen Army and was serving his time as a bookbinder with Dollards, Wellington Quay, when the Easter Rising of 1916 started. He absented himself from work, fought at St Stephen's Green and with the College of Surgeons garrison and, when captured, was imprisoned with many others in Frongoch, Wales.

"He came home at the end of 1916, undernourished and unwell," his grandson says. "Dr Kathleen Lynn had a team of nurses looking after the returnees and a nurse called Brigid Davis, who'd been in City Hall during the rising, looked after my grandfather. The two of them married."

Patrick Duffy's continued involvement in the War of Independence and Civil War disrupted his bookbinding career somewhat but, in time, the newlyweds settled in Preston Street, off Amiens Street, and Patrick Duffy set up a printing business. It didn't, sadly, work out so he went to work for Alex Thoms on Botanic Road as a bookbinder. He and Brigid had five children: Patrick, Tommy, Maureen, Brid and Joe. Tommy (born 1925) was the one who went into the business.

"Tommy, my father, served his time as a bookbinder in Alex Thoms in the 1940s," Tom says. "The printing trade was reasonably well paid in those days, compositors and the like used wear top hats and felt they were somebody. My father was very much involved with the bookbinders union and used teach night classes in Bolton Street. He introduced his students to the London City and Guild exams, there being no Irish standards at the time. We've had our own standards for a long time now."

Tommy Duffy met his wife, Kathleen (nee Crawford, from Drumcondra), in Alex Thoms where she worked as a "table hand", a lesser then and lesser now end of bookbinding where ledgers are sewn, sheets gathered and such. "Women weren't allowed become full bookbinders," Tom says, "there were no women printers either. There was, and is, a lot of physical work involved, doing the fittings and operating the guillotine and cutting down paper. Women are more into the romantic end of bookbinding."

Tommy Duffy and Kathleen married in 1953 and lived in Benevin Road, Finglas, where they reared their children - Tommy, Patrick, Martin and Bernadette. (Martin studied and works in computers, Bernadette lives and is married in Scotland.)

Tommy Duffy was working in Alex Thoms' George's Hill outlet when Smurfits decided in 1969/70 to close it and move everything and everyone back to Botanic Road.

"My mother had always been on at him to go out on his own and so, because Botanic Road would have been awkward for him, he took the chance and started the business at the back of the house on Benevin Road in 1970. I started working for him in 1973 and Pat started in 1976. He'd a bookbinder called Frank Hedderman working for him too, and my mother worked in the business all the time."

By 1978 the set-up at the rear of the house was no longer large enough for the growing business.

"My father was friendly with Frank Jennings, the undertaker, who offered him the top of a house to rent on Seville Place. This was just sorted when my father took sick and died, on May 30th, 1978. He was 53. I was 22 and had to take over. Frank died in February 1981 and that left Pat and myself and our mother. We bought Seville Place in about 1985 and years later, in the mid-1990s, bought this place when we were offered it. The house on Seville Place needed lots of work so we sold it and now we've well settled in here."

Kathleen Duffy is 83 years old, "still interested and asking about the business. But we keep her out of the place," Tom laughs. "Her sister, Bernie Naughton, helped out a lot, working part-time in the 1970s and 1980s."

The bookbinding business has hugely changed. "The main change," Tom says, "is the number of books not printed in Ireland any more. The cost differential between printing here and abroad is huge. When we started 90 per cent of the books we worked on came from the Irish market; now only about 25 per cent come from the Irish market. We can't compete with overseas prices where they have machinery geared to cater to populations of 60/70 million. Wages in Spain and Italy are not the same as here either, plus you've markets like China to consider. Technology, too, means people can do a lot of what we used do online."

A lot of their work today is on university theses, art projects, bindings for libraries. "You can bind a book with anything," Pat Duffy says, "wallpaper even."

They remember a customer who'd travelled the world turning up with his snaps wanting them bound in the leather trousers he was wearing and had worn on his travels. Duffys decided his knapsack was cleaner so cut it up and did a bookbinding job which pleased everyone.

"Our oldest customer is Dundalgan Press," Tom says, "who came to us in 1973 and print lots of registers for hospitals. We did the library in the Dylan Hotel, too, off Baggot Street. The interior designer was Michelle Kennedy and she came to us with her idea, which was to bind the entire library of 600 books in a very nice green, with the titles all set in metal." It's a job of which Duffy Bookbinders is justly proud.

Looking to the future Pat says he and his wife Angela's son Darragh "won't be coming into the business; there just isn't enough work for him. There is work, mostly to do with binding local histories, and library stuff, and rebindings of special hardbacks. Magazines like Hot Press, Phoenix, Village, Food and Wine, U and such come to us to have editions bound in files. There's always work, just not the same big runs on books there used to be."

When Tommy Jnr was studying bookbinding in DIT Bolton Street there were 14 in his class. "Even a few years after that it was hard to get anyone to do straight bookbinding," he says.

All of this said, they're not at all fearful of the trade dying. "People love books and rooting around and through books, even if the internet has eliminated a lot of reference books and diaries have definitely gone. People will always want books bound and books won't die."