Publications | Down Survey | 1997 Issue Contents

Downpatrick's First Printed Book?
W Gordon Wheeler

Title Page of the Downpatrick printed catalogue of 1801 (Down County Museum) Actual size: 105 x 170 mm

The only known copy of the catalogue of which the title-page is reproduced is in the possession of the library of Down County Museum (accession no. DB 538), and it is the purpose of this article to suggest that it is also the earliest known example of printing to be produced in Downpatrick by a resident printer. Certainly five other publications with eighteenth-century imprints would at first sight appear to have claims to have been issued in the county town, but are much more likely to have been printed elsewhere or possibly on a travelling press set up temporarily. The Bradshaw Collection in Cambridge University Library contains four half-sheet political squibs bearing no printer's name, of which two are dated 1754 and deal with Robert Scott, MP for Newry; and two are undated (but obviously printed in 1756) and deal with Bowen Southwell, MP for Downpatrick. One of the 1754 items and one of the 1756 items have Downpatrick imprints, but the other two have no place of printing.1 It is, however, improbable that Downpatrick had an established press at this early

date, and Dix too inclined to think that these 1750s printings were produced somewhere else.² In County Down only Newry is definitely known to have had a press by 1745,³ at which time it was already very much larger and commercially more important than Downpatrick.⁴ If these ephemeral squibs of the 1750s are not to be assigned to Newry, then there is the possibility that they could have been run off in Downpatrick on a visiting press.The construction of the wooden common press in use up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century would have presented no problems to a competent local carpenter in possession of working drawings, although the metal parts required would not have been so easy and would have had to be ordered in. Such a press could be fairly speedily dismantled and re-erected and moved from place to place. In June 1690 William III had brought a campaign printer to Ireland for the purpose of producing necessary proclamations and documents in his camps during stops in his progression to the Boyne and eventually Dublin.⁵ In 1784 Amyas Griffiths of Belfast was the owner of a private portable press which he used to print squibs during an election at Carrickfergus; and the following year he again sent up his press and a case of type by horse and cart for the same purpose.⁶

The only other eighteenth-century printing associated with Downpatrick is a song-book sheet, Liberty and Independence, with the imprint 'Down: printed in the year 1790',⁷ but the interpretation of such an imprint is open to doubt. In view of the subject matter and the times, it is perhaps not surprising that the printer was reluctant to put his name to a publication like this; or that the place of printing should be left deliberately ambiguous. If 'Down' does indeed in this instance stand for Downpatrick, the absence of any further Downpatrick printing around this date would suggest rather that the songbook was printed elsewhere but for distribution by a Downpatrick bookseller. Significantly a letter specifically addressed to the electors of Downpatrick by Lord De Clifford, the town's proprietor was printed in the same year by a 'Hillsborough printer',⁸ which would imply that no printer was available in Downpatrick.

The Printer
James Park was a member of one of the dynastic families which were prominent in the development of printing throughout the provinces of Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century.⁹ Seven Parks were at work in Louth and south Down, and later in Cavan and Longford, over a period of possibly up to 65 years. Although we do not know the precise relationship, it seems likely that the first generation, Joseph, William and James were brothers. Joseph Parks was printing in Dundalk from perhaps 1782 but certainly 1799 until his death in 1821, when he was succeeded by his son, James junior, who was still operating there in 1846.¹⁰ A single book is known from William's press in Newry in 1806, before he transferred his printing shop to Longford town, where his last known imprint was 1829, although Mary Parks, in all probability his widow, was still in the trade there in 1846.¹¹

The Down Literary Society's library catalogue of 1801 is so far the earliest known production of James Parks who certainly had premises in English Street, Downpatrick, when it was printed. He was still in the town in 1803, when he brought out his most substantial book, John Moore. Johnston's quirky miscellany Heterogenea, an octavo volume running to 322 printed pages. This was funded by advance subscription, and the alphabetical list of subscribers contained in it provides some further details of Park's activities. He appears in the list three times - as 'Mr James Park, Ballynahinch' (sic), as 'Mr James Printer, Dromore' (i.e. with the accidental omission of his surname), and as 'James Parks, 'Printer, Etc, Down' In this last entry he has his name down for no less than 50 copies, and the 'Etc' after his name is significant. Clearly he was typical of most minor provincial printers of his day in that he could not depend solely on his jobbing printing for income, but had other commercial interests such as bookselling and stationery, possibly even supplemented by quite unrelated dealing in, for example, hardware, groceries or patent medicines, The evidence of the subscription list suggests further shops of some kind or another in Ballynahinch and Dromore. The continuance of casual printing in a provincial locality often relied on the security guaranteed by the proprietorship of a newspaper with the steady work and advertisement income generated by it. James Parks had no such connection in any of the places where his name is found, and indeed Downpatrick did not have a newspaper of its own until the advent of Conway Pilson's Downpatrick Recorder in 1836.

There are in the Bradshaw Collection 29 ephemeral items dealing with the County Down election of 1805.¹² All but one of these are single page handbills, broadsides and slips bearing neither place of publication, printer's name nor date of printing. The exception is an eight-page pamphlet, To the Freeholders of the County Down, with the imprint 'Downpatrick 1805', and it would seem likely that the whole group was printed by James Parks, either at Downpatrick or at Newry where he is found from 1806 onwards at the same address which William (his brother?) had used. Of all the items so far known to have been produced by James, only one has a Dromore imprint - William Cunningham of Magherabeg's Poems of 1808.¹³. This too may well have been actually printed in Newry and given the imprint of James's Dromore outlet because of its proximity to the author's home.

James Parks continued in Newry until at least 1813,¹⁴ but is known to have died in 1815 at Cootehill, County Cavan, where Paul Parks (his son'?) is recorded as a printer in the following year. If they had been brought up in the family trade, younger brothers and younger sons had to make their careers in places at a distance from their father's and elder brothers' businesses. The Sarah Parks printing in Cootehill between 1821 and 1829 was probably Paul's widow.¹⁵

The Catalogue
As originally issued the catalogue was a small octavo pamphlet consisting of title-leaf and 48 further unnumbered leaves. Twenty-five leaves were printed on their rectos only, and the final two on both rectos and versos; the remainder were blank interleaves falling between the letters of the alphabet and intended for the manuscript addition of new titles. The sections are unsigned, so, without disbinding, it is impossible to determine the precise relationship between interleaves and text.
Where watermarks remain, they occur in the upper inner margins of leaves: they include two versions of a crowned escutcheon, but not enough of the charge is visible for further description; parts of countermarks include the date 179- (the last digit being lost in the gutters), the initial G, and the beginning of a name L Pa....¹⁶ The quality of the laid paper is good, quite unlike the decidedly mediocre material employed by Parks for his Heterogenea of 1803.

The Museum's copy has had ten interleaves and the leaves containing the authors' names for Q and X/Y excised, doubtless to provide a former owner with convenient scrap paper. It has a typical pamphlet binding of its time - stabbed oversewing with wrappers of monochrome hand-blocked wallpaper. The Library contained 281 titles amounting to 704 volumes, but the Museum's copy of the catalogue has been neatly updated in manuscript to about 1807 with a further 63 titles in 100 volumes. The verso of the letter B and the following interleaf have been put to use by a former owner at some time shortly after 1810 to jot down a priced 'List of Books I intend to buy by degrees.'

An analysis of the Library's content reveals it to have been fairly representative of its kind in its subject emphases. Geography and travel; history and biography; and literature account for roughly 25% of the titles each, whereas politics and law; religion, philosophy and ethics; and science and agriculture make up only 8% each. There is little in the way of social science or education and absolutely nothing on the fine arts or music. Although such a picture reflects the essentially conservative frame of mind of the Society's membership, it must be said that the quality of the titles selected for inclusion in its Library is remarkably high, even allowing for the declared seriousness of purpose which underlay most such reading societies of the larger sort.

The Down Literary Society¹⁷
Many small rural reading and discussion societies were formed by groups of educated artisans, farmers and weavers in Antrim and Down in the 1780s and 1790s. They were motivated by the intellectual Enlightenment and by the stirring political developments which had occurred in America and France. Consequently they were often regarded by the authorities as hotbeds of radicalism and became targets for suppression in 1797 and 1798. Their aim was to circulate books which were financially beyond the means of their members, but not necessarily to build up permanent libraries.

The larger subscription libraries in many country towns were set up by essentially middle-class associations of local gentry, the professions and prosperous merchants, who could afford to pay an often fairly substantial entrance fee. Such was the Down Literary Society in Downpatrick and its other contemporaries in County Down, like itself eventually possessing their own premises and libraries, in Portaferry (1786), Newtownards (1789), Banbridge (1795) and Newry (1809).

According to the title-page of the catalogue, the Society was founded on Sth March 1793. The regulations, as amended in May 1801 and printed in an appendix to the catalogue, provided for monthly meetings at 8.00 o'clock in the evening and fined the officers (President, Secretary and Librarian) heavily for non-attendance, Members living in Downpatrick were also fined for missing meetings, though less severely. A committee of nine, required to meet once a month and likewise liable to fining, was responsible for recommending books for purchase subject to the approval of the full stated meetings of the Society. Democratically but inefficiently both committee and President had to be elected every three months, although the Secretary and Librarian continued in office for a year. New members were voted on by ballot at meetings, but had to secure a two-thirds majority for admission. Membership of the Society was proprietory, in that it could be inherited by close relatives, or bequeathed to whomsoever the testator wished; or it could be sold with due approval.

The fund for purchase of new books was maintained by means of the fining system; an entrance fee of one guinea; and a twelve shilling annual subscription. Members were allowed to borrow only a single work at a time for periods of up to a month depending upon the physical size of the volumes. Overdue loans incurred a fine of two pence a day.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the Library was housed in premises in English Street and the Society was obviously flourishing by the 1820s. When the Rev. Francis Wilson resigned as Librarian in 1821, it could afford to pay his successor, Edward Dogherty, an annual salary of £20 . In 1824 Aynsworth Pilson reported a meeting which had to be moved to the Market House at the foot of Irish Street because no less than 75 members turned up.¹⁸ Subsequently the Library too was to find new temporary accommodation in the Market House, but by 1828 the Society was able to contemplate having its own library building. John Lynn, the local architect and building contractor, was commissioned to build a library and reading room on the east side of Church Avenue at a cost of £220. The books were transferred from the Market House in January 1829, and the newsroom opened on 2nd February.¹⁹

In 1836, although the annual subscription had remained at twelve shillings, the entrance fee had doubled to two guineas, and the Library was described as neither "very extensive or very select", consisting chiefly of novels.²⁰ Certainly the original catalogue of 1801 could claim to have been both select and
discriminating, so the changing tastes of the membership must have brought about a radical change in policy.

Lynn's building, which had used as its foundations what proved to be the unstable remnants of the old Linen Hall in Church Avenue, was badly shaken by the 'Big Wind' of January 1839, and eventually part of it collapsed in December. Although the books sustained little damage; their usefulness was much diminished by the subsequent string of unsatisfactory moves round various temporary addresses. One member, James Quail, bequeathed £100 towards the building of new premises, but the impetus and interest had been lost, the new building never materialised, and the Downpatrick Recorder duly reported the Society's demise in 1849.²¹

A second Downpatrick Literary Society was set up in 1864 by disaffected members of the Downpatrick Mechanies Institute, which had been founded for younger members of the artisan and commercial class unable to afford the exclusive middle-class charges of the Down Literary Society's Library but, although this had a newsroom in English Street, it never succeeded in building up a library and closed down in the early 1870s. In 1891 James Quail's legacy to the Down Literary Society, which by this time had increased to £145, was handed over by its trustee to the Downpatrick Newsroom and Library. This had been founded in 1886 in Church Avenue on a site next door to the Society's ill-fated building and was the forerunner of the town's Carnegie Public Library.

Gordon Wheeler: Former Humanities Librarian at Queen's University; Past President of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, and active member of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.

References

1.	A Catalogue of the Bradshaw Collection of Irish books in the University Library Cambridge, 1916, Vol. 2, items 5166-5 169.
2.	E R McC.Dix, ' Ulster bibliography: Downpatrick....,' in Ulster Journal of Archaeology 2nd series, 7, 1901, p 172.
3.	Journal of the Irish House of Commons, 6 November 1749.
4.	W Harris, The ancient and present state of the County of Down, 1745, p 88.
5.	G Benn, 'Early printing in Belfast' chapter 18 in his History of the town of Belfast, 1877, p.425
6.	F J Bigger, Amyas Griffiths, surveyor of Belfast, 17801785, 1916.
7 .	S O' Casaide, A typographical gazetteer of Ireland; or, The beginning of printing in Irish towns, 1923, p.25.
8 .	Bradshaw Collection, op.cit., item 5214.
9 .	W G Wheeler, 'The spread of provincial printing in Ireland up to 1850,' in Irish booklore, 4, 1978/1980, pp. 7-18.
10 .	E R McC Dix, 'Printing in Dundalk 1801-1900,' in Irish book lover, 5, 1913/14, pp. 46-47, 58-59, 78-80; 8, 1916/17, pp.123-124; O' Casaide, op. cit, p.28.
11 .	P Crossle, 'The Printers of Newry' in Newry Reporter, March 30-October 7, 1911; E R McC Dix, 'Printing in Longford in the nineteenth century', in Irish book lover 12, 1920/21, pp 53-55; O Casaide, op. cit., p.36
12 .	Bradshaw Collection, op. cit., items 5170-5194.
13 .	O'Casaide, op-cit., p. 26
14 .	Crossle, op.cit.
15 .	O'Casaide, op cit., PP 22-23
16 .	This combination of letters corresponds with no likely name in the standard published collections of modern European and British watermarks by Churchill, Heawood or Shorter; or in J W Phillips, 'A trial list of Irish papermakers 1690-1800,' in The Library, 5th series, 13, 1958, pp.59-62.
17 .	Any writer on the history of libraries in County Down must depend heavily on the researches of the late J.R.R. Adams who has left few unturned stones for subsequent workers in the field to stumble upon; the following of his publications and other pieces contain notices of the Down Literary Society: A history of libraries in County Down (unpublished Library Association thesis), 1977; 'Downpatrick's link with books goes back to St. Patrick: the old libraries of Downpatrick' in Down Recorder, 2/3/1978, Supplement; 'Reading Societies in Ulster' in Ulster Folklife, 26, 1980, PP 58,60; The printed word and the common man: popular culture in Ulster 1700-1900, 1987,p 123. For a list of the libraries known to have existed in Downpatrick, see also R H Buchanan and A Wilson, Irish historic towns atlas. No. 8: Downpatrick, 1997, p13
18 .	A Pilson, Diaries, in Down County Museum, 6/1/1824.
19 .	W G Wheeler, 'John Lynn - architect/contractor/ engineer,' in Lecale Miscellany, 15, 1997, PP 31-32.
20 .	M M Kertland, 'Parish of Down ... 1836', in Ordnance Survey memoirs of Ireland, ed by A. Day and P. McWilliams, Vol. 17, 1992, p.47.
21 .	Downpatrick Recorder, 28/2/1849