Our Story

The Winding Stair has been a landmark of the Irish literary scene in the same iconic spot since the 1980s.

The building is listed as a protected structure by Dublin City Council and has housed a sales and auction house, an art gallery, a toy shop, and the In Dublin magazine offices. Its neighbour restaurant the Woolen Mills once housed the original Dublin Woolen Mills, a haberdashery which traded on this corner since 1888. The literary great James Joyce once worked as an agent here selling Irish tweed. This corner is also the spot where Hector Grey traded from 1904-1985. Sitting directly opposite the famous Ha’penny Bridge, the Winding Stair is steeped in history.

In 1982, Kevin Connolly rented a partitioned corner of one floor of what was the In Dublin office and opened the Winding Stair Bookshop and Café. Connolly was a life-long lover of Yeats and named the shop, as much as for the iconic winding staircase upstairs, as for the Yeats’ poem ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’:

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;

Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

Upon the breathless starlit air,

Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

Fix every wandering thought upon

That quarter where all thought is done:

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees

Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,

Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

Unspotted by the centuries;

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

From some court-lady's dress and round

The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t'other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it

Five hundred years ago, about it lie

Flowers from I know not what embroidery—

Heart's purple—and all these I set

For emblems of the day against the tower

Emblematical of the night,

And claim as by a soldier's right

A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows

And falls into the basin of the mind

That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,

For intellect no longer knows

Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—

That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

Only the dead can be forgiven;

But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,

A blind man battering blind men;

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

Originally, Connolly planned to just take a gap year to run the tiny bookshop and sell coffee. Whereas today you would need a lot of capital to get into such a landmark location, Connolly opened with ‘five boxes of books, a twenty pound note, a huge amount of enthusiasm and absolutely no knowledge of bookselling’. However, the shop being so close to In Dublin made it an immediate meeting place for writers, musicians, and artists, all charmed by its collection of second-hand books and the famous fruit cake baked by Connolly’s mother. Soon the shop was hosting readings and book launches, the hundreds who performed in the shop over the years including Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, and James McAuley. Many famous Irish writers and artists spent time creating at its tables, including Patrick McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Sinead O’Connor, and Nancy Griffith. In Dublin moved out, and the bookshop took expanded to the rest of the building.

Connolly sold the business in 2005. The changing city meant increases in rents, rates, insurance, and intolerance of businesses that didn’t bring in big profits. There were mutterings about the end of an era but in 2006, the much-loved spot was brought back to life as a restaurant.The bookshop on the ground floor was kept and retains its timeless charm with stripped wood tables, the original chandeliers, and the old girders. The view, of course, remains quintessentially Dublin.

Today, the Winding Stair remains a champion of Irish literature and local and emerging writers and artists, and is a community space beloved by locals and visitors alike. The bookshop is smaller than it once was (ascending the winding stair brings you now to a beautiful restaurant) but in the tightly packed shelves we have curated an diverse selection of quality books. Our shop is crammed full of literary treasures just waiting for you to find them!