While in Australia to fulfil his role as International Patron for the 2008 Crime & Justice festival, Brendan Kilty will also launch the Australian edition of his book, “Sweny.”

“I want to bring you on a Joycean journey that will end at the counter of Sweny’s Chemist at No. 1 Lincoln Place in Dublin’s city centre where you can buy a bar of Sweny’s lemon soap, the aphrodisiac of world literature.”

So begins this stunning book that chronicles the real life history of the pharmacy that James Joyce famously incorporated into Ulysses. Joyce has Leopold Bloom purchasing a ‘pay later’ bar of lemon soap at Sweny’s on the morning of June 16th 1904. It was some of these bars of soap, purchased by him at Sweny’s, that Colm Toibin threw to the audience in Melbourne in 2004 (exactly 100 years later) when he and Brendan Kilty were on stage together to mark the unveiling of the Brendan Kilty/James Joyce Seat of Learning, one of 63 public sculptures being built in cities around the world.

Sweny's Chemist is located at No. 1 Lincoln Place and remains unchanged from what it looked like in 1904.  Sweny’s is a small compounding chemist’s shop about 16ft square with a white shop front appropriate to its early Victorian age established as F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists in 1853. Kilty uses this preserved and operating pharmacy as his cornerstone to take the reader on a visual journey through Joyce’s Dublin as it can still be experienced in 2008. He combines the 134 pages of full colour photographs with an informative, entertaining, and historically accurate narrative of Joyce’s Dublin and the city as it is today, engrossing the reader with a tangible connection to the city that spawned not only what many consider to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century, but which has an impeccable literary pedigree. As Brendan remarks in the book:

“It is the epic centre of some extraordinary events in literature and history. If you stand at Sweny’s door and describe a circle with a radius of 100 yards give or take you will find your North point outside the birthplace of Oscar Wilde on Westland Row and your South point at his home at No. 1 Merrion Square. To the west, you will still find the faint paint of Finn’s Hotel on the gable of Lincoln Place. Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s lover and ultimate wife, worked here as a chambermaid and it is from the front door of Finn’s Hotel that she spied on Joyce as he stood outside Wilde’s house when she deliberately stood him up on the evening of the 15th June 1904.”

The book, Sweny’s, also encapsulates the history of Dublin beyond Joyce, pinpointing as it does historical markers around which Sweny’s sits and incorporating some of Dublin’s past residents, including Redmond Barry who would go on to become a figure of enormous import in Australian history.

Earlier this year, Brendan Kilty became ‘the keeper’ of Sweny’s and will no doubt ensure its survival as he has done 15 Usher’s Island, the home of Joyce’s great-aunts and the setting for his revered short story “The Dead”. Kilty describes Sweny’s thus:

The shelves and their contents are arranged in a moment of time which no longer exists. This shop is a living but superior example of the preservation of the entrails of literature comparable to no other pharmacy in world literature but analogous, if analogy is appropriate, to the preservation in Dublin of Francis Bacon’s London studio exactly as it was the last day he left it.