Irish Parliamentary Bookbindings Revisited

This exhibition is presented by the Irish Georgian Society in partnership with the Office of Public Works, and explores the destruction and recreation of the Irish Parliamentary Bookbindings.

In the last decade of the 19th century, the book collector and amateur book binder Sir Edward Sullivan was shown a collection of 149 large volumes in exquisite bindings that had been stored, unnoticed, over many years in the Public Records Office in Dublin. They were in fact the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons of the old Irish Parliament, that ceased to exist after the 1800 Act of Union.

For many years, prior to their transfer to the new Public Records Office behind the Four Courts in 1865, these exquisite books were stored in the Record Tower at Dublin Castle. Unfortunately, in 1922, at the start of the Irish Civil War, the Public Records Office was destroyed in an explosion and all the exquisite bindings perished in the flames.

Fortunately, Sir Edward Sullivan had made rubbings of all the bindings and had taken photographs of twenty of them.

In 2017, a major exhibition in Dublin Castle showcased fourteen of those bindings that had been reproduced through the research and work of Dr Philip Maddock. Through compiling a visual database of Irish bookbinding hand tools, Maddock identified individual tools that matched those used on the Irish Parliamentary bindings. Images of these were then used to commission new brass tools from P and S Engraving and from A B S Supplies (Stewart Field) in Bristol, UK.

With these in hand, Maddock commissioned Trevor Lloyd of Ludlow, UK to bind a total of 14 examples of the Irish parliamentary bindings. Through an exceptionally generous gesture, he donated five of these volumes to the Irish Georgian Society which are presented as the core of this exhibition.

This exhibition is produced in partnership with the OPW, with funding from the Heritage Council, the National Built Heritage Service and Northern Trust.