Madam, - I read with interest in last Saturday's Irishman's Diary, Rivers Carew's account of his own contribution, as one of the editors of The Dubliner, to the emergence of a new literary and artistic scene in Dublin in the early 1960s.
A sense of both friendship and historical balance compel me to regret that your diarist does not mention, even en passant, another significant endeavour of the times. I refer of course to Broadsheet, edited by Hayden Murphy. Hayden Murphy's brilliant original idea was to take new writing out of the covers of traditional literary magazines. Hayden, sometimes accompanied by one of his suffering but dedicated contributors, sold his Broadsheet for a few shillings to many of the Dublin pub literati of the time that could be persuaded to buy it during his rounds (and theirs).
Broadsheet was an assemblage of poems, drawings and short prose pieces, cajoled from their authors, photocopied and then printed on the two sides of an often single broadsheet. Your readers may be interested to discover the poets and artists who contributed to Broadsheet and later achieved a certain measure of fame, by consulting the illustrated catalogue of a retrospective exhibition held in the National Library of Scotland some decades ago to celebrate Broadsheet and its poet-editor. - Yours, etc,
JEAN-PAUL PITTION, Rue Condorcet, Paris.