A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800

In 1977 the Bibliographical Society in London produced a compact, integrated edition of the several volumes of H. R. Plomer et al.'s Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland during the period 1641-1775, originally published between 1909 and 1932. A quarter of a century later, it seems unlikely that Plomer's pioneering dictionary will ever again be reprinted, because so much of it has been superseded. The Scottish book trade, for example, has been well served by John Morris's "Scottish Book Trade Index" (SBTI), which became widely available on the National Library of Scotland's website in 1998 and now exists in a new, greatly expanded PDF version that can be downloaded directly on to one's home computer at no charge (www.nls.uk/catalogue/resources/sbti/SBTI.pdf), rendering obsolete G. H. Bushnell's sections on the Scottish trade in Plomer's dictionary. A similar result has occurred in regard to the early modern Irish book trade, using more traditional publishing methods. Robert Munter's A Dictionary of the Print Trade in Ireland 1550-1775 began the process in 1988. Now Mary Pollard has swept away both Munter and Plomer (or more precisely, E. R. McC. Dix, who contributed the sections on Irish bibliography to Plomer's dictionary), at least insofar as the Dublin trade is concerned.

Pollard's work is a monumental achievement. Using the manuscript records of the Dublin stationers' guild, St. Luke the Evangelist, as well as other manuscripts, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, and secondary sources of every description, Pollard has amassed a formidable amount of data, crammed into nearly seven hundred densely packed pages. Her dictionary ranges so widely in regard to occupations (twenty of them within the trade, including papermakers and engravers) and chronology (from the beginning of the Dublin trade c. 1500 until 1800, including those twenty-five crucial years at the end of the eighteenth century that Plomer/Dix and Munter both omitted), and does the job so thoroughly, that it sets a new standard of comprehensiveness, documentation, and accuracy for dictionaries of the early modern book trade. The book includes three maps of Dublin that are useful for recreating the geography of the trade at particular times during the course of the eighteenth century. It also contains an introductory essay on the evolution of the stationers' guild from 1670 to 1800, a readers' guide, a checklist of members of the trade arranged by occupational subgroup, a map of paper mills in the vicinity of Dublin, bibliographies of manuscripts and secondary sources, and a thorough listing of newspapers and periodicals.

I tested the dictionary by examining closely a database of more than one hundred mid- and late eighteenth-century Dublin booksellers whose names appear in the imprints of Dublin publications that I am currently studying. In the great majority of cases, especially among the figures who were most active and important, the dictionary provided a vast amount of new information about such topics as apprenticeships, marriages, birth and/or death dates, kinship ties, lines of succession, bankruptcies, wills, even politics and ideology. Among other things, I gained a new appreciation for the role of family, including women, and began to realize various kinds of connections that could lead to a richer understanding of the workings of the trade. To cite but one example, the names Leathley, Hallhead, and McKenzie were all known to me from Dublin imprints, but I had only a superficial knowledge of the nature of their inter-relationships until I encountered Pollard's dictionary. There I learned that Joseph Leathly's name began appearing in Dublin reprints in 1719; that Anne Leathly succeeded her husband upon his death in 1757, and was in turn succeeded after her death in 1775 by her nephew, William Hallhead, who had probably been her foreman; that in 1779 Hallhead married Sarah Casson, who succeeded him after his death in 1781, trading as S[arah] Hallhead; that two years later she married William McKenzie, who had worked for the Hallheads since about 1781; and that McKenzie then took over the business and ran it until his death in 1817. That's a pretty good story, spanning an entire century, and featuring two women who kept the firm alive at critical periods.

The work's most troublesome shortcoming is the lack of an index. Although a biographical dictionary does not usually have an index, one is required here because of the unusual density of the material and the obscurity of most of the subjects. Readers wishing to learn about the connections of the Dublin book trade with, say, the United Irishmen or Roman Catholicism, or with the book trades in London, Philadelphia, Belfast, or Glasgow, or with particular institutions and streets in Dublin itself, are going to be frustrated, not because the work lacks information on such topics (quite the contrary), but because there is no easy way to get at it. The contrast in accessibility with the searchable PDF version of SBTI is great, especially when one considers that Pollard's dictionary is too expensive for purchase by most individuals. Perhaps a time will come when, like Ian Maxted's The London Trades 1775-1800 - which originally appeared in book form in 1977 but is now freely accessible on the web (www.devon.gov.uk/library/locstudy/bookhist/) - Pollard's dictionary will be made available in this format. In the meantime, the Bibliographical Society would do a great service by making a thorough index available online, to which purchasers and users of the dictionary might be directed by means of a notice pasted inside the book and circulated on appropriate internet lists and websites.

The dictionary may also be a little disappointing to readers seeking insight into patterns of printing and publication that marked individual careers in the Dublin book trade, or to readers attempting to discover how individuals in the trade contributed to the printing and publication of works in particular genres, or by particular authors. Entries for members of the trade who were involved in book publishing typically cite several of their imprints, without indicating why those titles were chosen over others and without generalizing about the contributions of the subjects under whom they appear. In fact, the imprint selection process is avowedly "random" (xlv), and for that reason it is not consistently useful. Only occasionally do the entries contain generalizations that summarize or assess the contributions of particular individuals. We are told that the output of George Ewing (d. 1774) was "large and relatively adventurous" (187), and that his grandson Thomas (d. 1776) had "an extensive and solid list of pub[licatio]ns" (189). Vague as they are, such pronouncements are welcome because they provide points of guidance drawn from Pollard's vast knowledge of eighteenth-century Dublin printing and publishing. One wishes there were more.

Another problem arises from an occasional lack of bibliographical consistency and efficiency. In regard to secondary sources, for example, the bibliography of "Printed Books, Pamphlets, & Unpublished Theses" (657-67) actually includes some published articles as well, while omitting many other articles (and some books) that are cited in the text. As I learned the hard way, a reader who casually notices in one of the biographical entries a citation to an article of interest that turns out to be excluded from the bibliography may have a difficult time finding it again. Items cited repeatedly in the text contain full bibliographical information every time they are mentioned, even when they also appear in the bibliography; in such cases, some congestion could have been avoided by means of a parenthetical reference to the author's name alone in the text, augmented by a word or two from the title when more than one entry by that author appears in the bibliography.

These limitations suggest that Pollard's dictionary may be improved, but it will not be superseded. It constitutes a landmark in Irish book history, and early modern book history generally, which will remain indispensable for a long time to come.