Literary Criticism The journey of publisher-scholar Michael Adams, from his homeplace among the Fermanagh hills by way of Belfast and the groves of Dublin, where he was made an honorand by Trinity College last December, is one of flesh and blood and the passion of the mind, made manifest in this handsome festschriften assembled by his work colleagues.
The fruit of that passion is documented in an appendix of over 800 titles published between 1977 and 2005, ranging from two works by the man himself, The Hard Life: Religion for Young Adults (1977) and Single-minded: A Tract on Chastity, Mainly in the Context of Celibacy (1979), to Georges Denis Zimmerman's magnificent Songs of Irish Rebellion (2002) and The Irish Storyteller (2001): a hard life, and what single-mindedness and chastity that they should yield such a harvest. We are each of us in Michael Adams's debt, and households without a Four Courts book on their shelves are poor indeed.
And what of content (this brisk trot affords only a glimpse)? An appreciation of the man by fellow print-addict Jeremy Addis is warm and well measured but doesn't distinguish "thats" from "whichs", a common confusion in these aliterate times. Andrew Carpenter's scrupulous tour d'horizon on "the circulation of verse in early modern Ireland" denotes the "impolite" surfacing of the fart in early Irish letters and much besides. Toby Barnard's more arid exercise sifts the Rev James Hingston's library in Co Cork, first catalogued in 1774. Harry White's "sovereign ghosts of Thomas Moore" is somewhat self-referring and under-edited, with circumlocutions that mask an important subject matter. Nicola Gordon Bowe's essay on collector-barrister Sir Edward Sullivan, Bart's "well-bound books" is exemplary if dry, showing monotone illustrations of the bindings themselves, with inlays and onlays "in scrupulously gold-tooled crimson, black and cream", and charting Sullivan's extensive vocabulary of designs and decorations, and his role in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland (1885-1925). He had his own distinctive tiny stamp, "E.S. AURIFEX" (or "worker in gold"), that could float "a flowery, leafy and dotted scalloped lozenge bordering a central vesica beside two long-stemmed lilies, the entwined initials 'D.H.', and a quotation from Shakespeare's As You Like It: 'GOOD-DAY, AND HAPPINESS, DEAR ROSALIND'. JUNE.1914 on a blue morocco ground" - a far cry from Moore Street.
WN Osborough enters into delicious, well-apportioned detail drawn from the life and copious writings of the assistant barrister for Leitrim, Roscommon and Louth, John Finlay (1780-1856), auditor of TCD's Hist in 1809, rehearsing his gift for friendship (Moore, O'Connell, John Phillips) and his foundation legal texts (on tithes, game, inland fisheries, ecclesiastical law). Editor Raymond Gillespie highlights the role of John T Gilbert in making available Irish historical documents in the 19th century, usefully setting the scene for "a wider debate about Ireland, Irishness and Irish history". Two particular studies form fascinating retrievals: Jean-Michel Picard's on William Reeves (a Ballymena curate with nine children) and his definitive 1857 Life of St Columba (the cross-fertilising role of Ferdinand Keller, archaeologist and discoverer, or uncoverer, of La Tène tumuli near Zurich, resonates here); Bernadette Cunningham on John O'Donovan and his 1851 edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (a sideswipe at Brian Friel's play Translations is buried in a scholarly footnote, and unindexed). Tadhg O'Keefe's sprightly appraisal of Irish castellology and Leask's Irish castles has an interesting sting in its tail directed at one of his esteemed (indexed) colleagues. Nicholas Allen's interesting overview of literary magazine publishing in 1920s Ireland (Cabaret, Sex and Independence) promises rather more than it delivers; he discusses "transgressive sex" in Yeats's To- morrow, but fails to mention Leda and the Swan, which first surfaced in that short-lived periodical in August, 1924.
Here is a work that Michael Adams would surely approve (the finessed footnotes alone are a tribute to the master). In a Borgesean sense, Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland is testament to the texts that it addresses: commentary and source work in one, all departures and returns. It should be purchased and itself become part of the circulating library of ideas, the discourse that civilisation is founded upon.
Antony Farrell is publisher at The Lilliput Press
Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland, 1660-1941 Edited by Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie The Woodfield Press, 267pp. €45