The discovery of an Irish 18th-century bookbinder’s bill in a richly-tooled set of bound volumes is a rare occurrence. In 1778, William Naper of Loughcrew employed the firm of Sherrard & Brownrigg to produce a survey of his lands. They were paid the sum of £194 : 4s 51/2d for their work which included two oblong folio manuscript volumes of maps and the cost of binding.1 The two volumes with rococo titlepages and vignettes are bound in scarlet goatskin with borders, spines, and labels on the upper covers, richly tooled in gold. Inside the front cover of the first volume (MS 1399) is pasted the bill of the bookbinder, Alexander Kelburn.2
Alexander Kelburn was the son of James Kelburn (1700-66), bookbinder, stationer, bookseller, and publisher at the ‘Three Golden Balls’ in George’s Lane (later known as South Great George’s Street).3 The Stationers’ Guild records that Alexander, son of James Kelburn, bookbinder, was set free of the City and Guild on 5 July 1768,4 but subsequent to that he does not feature prominently in the Guild minutes, though he is shown as regularly paying his quarterly dues. He is last mentioned in the lists of Guild members in 1789 which is possibly the year of his death.5
Since the death of his father in 1766 at the age of sixty-six, Alexander presumably carried on the family business in George’s Lane.6 Wilson’s Dublin Directory first records his address as no 5 South Great George’s Street in 1778. By 1786 he is listed at no 44; and from 1787 until 1790 his address is given as 43 South Great George’s Street.
Kelburn had come to public attention early on in his career when his name appeared in the press in April 1768 along with that of eleven other master bookbinders who were in a dispute with the booksellers of the city. The conflict, which had dragged on from 1766, concerned the increased cost of binding in leather which the booksellers complained was prohibitive and proposed, instead, that books be ‘bound up in Boards, or sewed in blue paper.’7
It seems that Kelburn had found more lucrative outlets for his trade, apart from the booksellers, such as the binding of estate maps like the Naper volumes noted above. A number of finely-bound survey volumes in the National Library of Ireland and elsewhere can be identified as Kelburns’s work; his craftsmanship can be verified by comparison with the Naper volumes since bookbinders’ tools are engraved and not cast because they are heated when used on the leather. Even when tool designs are closely copied, minute differences can be observed under scrutiny. Through examining sets of tools it is possible to establish which shop various books come from.
The vogue for finely-bound estate maps with rococo frontispieces and maps decorated with vignettes can be traced to the magnificent eight-volume survey, commissioned by the 20th Earl of Kildare from the Anglo-French surveyor, John Rocque, Topographer to the Prince of Wales, in 1755, and completed five years later. The frontispieces to these volumes epitomise the rococo graphic style in Ireland and they were probably executed in part, at least, by former pupils of the Dublin Society Schools.8 That the Kildare maps excited contemporary interest is shown by the comments of an English visitor to Ireland, Lord Chief Baron Willes. Writing in 1760, he noted: ‘Lord Kildare...is one of the greatest improvers in Ireland...and has at an expense of some hundred pounds had his estates surveyed and curious maps made of his lands at Carton, Maynooth and that part of the kingdom.’9 John Rocque returned to England in 1760 but his ‘French school’ of cartography was dominated by his pupil, Bernard Scalé. Nearly all the Scalé surveys that I have come across in their original bindings are from the Kelburn shop, of which the following is a selection.10 The earliest Scalé survey in its original binding in the National Library appears to be that done in 1767 (survey of the lordship of Athboy and manor of Portlester) for the Earl of Darnley.11 This was followed by the Scalé survey of the estate of the Earl of Bessborough in the Barony of Deece and county of Meath in 1770.12
Two years later, Kelburn bound the surveys of the manors of Great and Little Belan (1772) for Lord Baltinglass in two volumes in red goatskin with gold tooling.13 In the following year, the firm of Scalé surveyed the manor of Fonstown for the Earl of Drogheda which survives in its original Kelburn binding.14 Among the last surveys by the Scalé firm in Ireland was that carried out for E Tighe in 1777, again in its original Kelburn binding.15 In the same year, Scalé’s partners (and former pupils) Thomas Sherrard and John Brownrigg left to set up a partnership which produced the Naper surveys and employed Kelburn to provide some of his most sumptuously-bound volumes to date (discussed above). This lavish style of Kelburn binding is seen again on a survey done in 1780 by John Berne for Christopher St George of Tyrone House in county Galway.16 The last known Kelburn binding is found on a survey by John Brownrigg of the Grand Canal from Dublin to the River Barrrow at Monasterevin in 1787.17
Apart from the multitude of estate maps, Kelburn also bound up at least one set of architectural plans – namely Thomas Ivory’s volume of coloured drawings of plans and elevations made in 1776 for the new Blue Coat School in Dublin – which have been described by Edward McParland as the ‘loveliest architectural drawings produced in Ireland in the eighteenth century.’ 18 The elegant folio, now in the British Library,19 was bound for presentation to King George III in reddish-tan goatskin and richly tooled with wide gilt borders enclosing a blue label and a large central lozenge on the upper and lower covers respectively. In 1784, Kelburn bound in red goatskin with gold tooling a small folio volume of a copy of the Charter of Limerick transcribed by Francis Perry, Deputy Clerk and Keeper of the the Rolls in Chancery. 20
Comparatively few printed volumes bound by Kelburn have come to light; the earliest is a cover for Charles Vallancy’s A Treatise on Inland Navigation (Dublin, printed for George & Alexander Ewing 1763), bound in calf leather, with gold-tooled borders and spine. 21 A similar binding is found on a five-volume quarto set of Alexander Pope’s Works (London 1767).22
In a special category discussed below are a number of presentation copies bound by Kelburn for Sir James Caldwell, author of the anonymously-published Debates Relative to the Affairs of Ireland, (privately printed in London 1766; 2nd edition 1779). Sir James Caldwell, (c. 1720-84) 4th Bt of Castle Caldwell, county Fermanagh was educated at Trinity College Dublin before heading off on the Grand Tour.23
He spent nearly seven years on the Continent making friends with Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Baron de Montesquieu. In order to gain military experience, he enlisted in the Austrian service where he served with distinction and was conferred with the title of Count of Milan by the Empress Maria Theresa in 1749, the second Protestant and foreigner (the other being the Duke of Marlborough) to be elevated to the Austrian peerage.24 Returning to Ireland, Sir James flung himself into the affairs of his country by writing books and pamphlets on economic and political affairs. He also hoped to acquire an Irish peerage; in fact, this became a lifelong obsession with no opportunity lost in opportuning the well-connected or those in authority. To further his cause, he gave £1,000 to his friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, ‘to lay out as she might think fit.’25 As he himself remarked, his efforts ‘caused more reading and writing to great personages than anything of the kind ever did before.’ It was all to no avail. His bitterness and disappointment were spelt out in a remarkable letter to Lord Townshend, who, he claimed, had promised him an Irish peerage some years previously:26
...I now suffer the anguish of disappointment and stand exposed as the Dupe of Sport or artifice, an insignificant retainer of state, cajoled and neglected, flattering myself with importance like the fly upon the wheel, officiously busy to render service that is despised and ridiculously elated with the hope of reward that never was intended to be conferred, the object of ineffable contempt and derision, insulted by all who with less pretensions have had more success and exposed to the taunting questions which were put to me with a sneer of insullent malignity when I last attended your levee where on asked whether my peerage was coming over another what I got in gratitude for my services and others threw out taunts which it is too mortifying to repeat...Under all this sense of excruciating injury however I have never complained.
Caldwell was to achieve posthumous recognition, however, with his publication of the debates of the Irish House of Commons in two octavo volumes: Debates Relative to the Affairs of Ireland in the Years 1763 and 1764: ‘This gentleman has the honour to stand foremost in the modern history of parliamentary literature. He was the first person who wrote a regular series of parliamentary debates from memory.’27 Sir James had written in the introduction that ‘I flatter myself that these debates...will discover abilities in the speakers, that would do honour to any age and to any nation...and that their speeches will not suffer by a comparison even with those of the Senate of Great Britain.’
As mentioned above, six copies of the Debates are now known in fine bindings by Kelburn, of which five were inscribed for presentation.28 The uninscribed set – the only one with raised bands on the spine – was possibly bound about ten years before the presentation copies.29 Curiously, four of the presentation copies of Caldwell’s Debates were bound up after publication of the second edition in 1779, even though three of the five are from the first edition of 1766. The most lavishly-bound copy (1779 edition)30 was that sent to the Imperial Court at Vienna by Caldwell in 1782, with the following inscription :
Le Compte Caldwell prens la liberté trés humblement de se prosterner aux pieds de sa Majesté Imperiale L’Empereur et de prier une Place pour ces Livres dans la Bibliotheque Imperiale qui sont presente a cet tres Auguste Monarque comme un petite Temoignage de san Devoûement et Fidelité a sa Sacrée Personne, A Castle Caldwell le 3me. de Mars 1782.
Other noteworthy recipients of the Debates included William Eden (later Lord Auckland), who was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1780. He was one of the many Government figures whom Caldwell had canvassed for a peerage. His presentation copy (1st edition, 1766), bound in red goatskin with a border and spine-tooled in gold, has an inscription dated (?) 1782.31 Thomas Pelham, Earl of Chicester, who was made Irish Secretary in the summer of 1783, received at the same time a copy of the Debates (1779 edition) from Caldwell which was bound in red goatskin with gold-tooled central lozenges and borders. This richly-tooled set was illustrated in a Maggs Bros Catalogue in 1975 32 and is in a private collection in the Channel Islands. In the same collection is another presentation volume with an inscription from Caldwell to ‘The Right Honourable Colonel Wynne’ and is dated 1777. Finally, the National Library of Ireland has a presentation copy of the Debates (1st edition, 1766) with an inscription from Caldwell to a Robert Wier (sic) dated (?) 1782. The binding is in green goatskin and is decorated on the spines and covers with gold tooling.33
Alexander Kelburn appears to have been influenced in his choice of tools by the Boulter Grierson, 34 Hallhead-McKenzie, and Abraham Bradley King ateliers; indeed many of his tools are copied from these sources.35 Kelburn worked equally well on a small scale and this is amply demonstrated by the bindings of two duodecimo size prayer books.36 The finest of the two covers, a Roman Catholic devotional book bound for the Countess of Fingall in red goatskin c. 1780, is lavishly decorated with all-over gold tooling.37
Interestingly, most of Kelburn’s business seems to have been involved with the binding up of manuscript maps and plans for draughtsmen, some of whom were associated with the Dublin Society’s schools, notably Thomas Ivory who was the first Master of the school for Drawing in Architecture in Shaw’s Court, not far from Kelburn’s shop in South Great George’s Street. As we have already seen, Ivory’s plans for the Blue Coat School were done up by Kelburn in one of his finest extant bindings for presentation to King George III in 1776.
Finally, of the group of twelve master binders who published the price rises for bookbinding in 1768, only the work of Josiah Sheppard, who headed the list, and now Alexander Kelburn, can be identified.38
Joseph McDonnell is the author of Five Hundred Years of the Art of the Book in Ireland (1997) reviewed in this issue.
Acknowledgements
I should like to express my thanks to the following institutions: staff and Trustees of the National Library of Ireland for their help and for permission to quote MSS. in their possession; the British Library; University Library Cambridge; Dr Ernst Gamillscheg, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; Maggs Bros., and those private collectors who wish to remain anonymous. I am also very grateful to the following individuals: Maurice Craig, Aidan and Maureen Heavey, David Griffin, Daniel Gillman, and the late Cyril McKeon, to whose memory this paper is dedicated.

1 National Library of Ireland MSS 1,399, 2,754. The two volumes are of different sizes: MS 1399 measures 370 x 269 x 27mm., while MS 2754 measures 537 x 375 x 28mm. The later volume is a larger and more elaborate copy of the former.
2 First published by D J Clarke and T P O’Neill, ‘Bookbinding in Ireland’, An Leabharlann, vol 12, no 1 (March 1955), p. 13.
3 E R McClintock Dix, ‘Irish Printers, Booksellers, and Stationers, 1726-1775’, in H R Plomer, G H Bushell, and E R McC Dix, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England,Scotland and Ireland form 1736-1775 (Oxford 1968); James Kelburn was apprenticed to George Ewing and admitted a free-brother of the Guild by service in 1734 (National Library of Ireland MS 12, 124, p. 62); the Guild records also show that he had two apprentices: John Grant, admitted a freebrother, 24 /8/1745 (NLI MS 12, 124, p. 195) and Thomas Nimmo, bound to James Kelburn, stationer 3/11/1749 (NLI MS 12, 131, p. 27).
4 Records of the Guild of St Luke the Evangelist, National Library of Ireland, MS 12, 125, pp. 42-43.
5 Ibid.
6 James Kelburn’s wife, Charlotte, died on 28 Dec 1763, Sleater’s Public Gazetteer (31 Dec 1763-Jany 1764), p. 242.
7 We the undernamed Book Binders of the City, having long laboured under considerable Disadvantages, from the excessive rise of Calf Leather (owing to the constant Export of raw Skins to Great Britain) find ourselves under a Necessity to advance the Price of binding Books and do now inform the Public, that we cannot bind any Duodecimo in Calf and lettered, under 10d. nor any Octavo under 1s. 1d. per Vol. and all other Sizes in Proportion.
Dublin , April 25, 1768
Josiah Sheppard Alexander Kelburn Abraham Willis
Daniel Cudmore William Crofton Thomas Euart
William Gilbert George Henderson William Crawford
George Burnett William Lillburn Henry Shepherd
Dublin Gazette, no 1849 (28-30 Apr 1768); see J W Phillips, ‘The Origin of the Publisher’s Binding in Dublin’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol 2, part 1, pp. 92-94; M Pollard, ‘Plain Calf for Plain People, Dublin Bookbinders’ Price Lists of the Eighteenth Century’, in A Bernelle, ed., Decantations (Dublin 1992), pp.177-186.
8 J McDonnell, ‘The Influence of the French Rococo Print in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, vol 36, pp. 63-73; see also A Hodge, A Study of the Rococo Decoration on John Rocque’s Maps and Plans 1755-1760, BA thesis, National College of Art and Design (Dublin 1994).
9 Quoted in J H Andrews, Plantation Acres (1985), p.160-61.
10 The only exception, known to me, are the bindings in tree-calf of the set of Scalé surveys (National Library of Ireland MS 1568-1570) carried out for the Earl of Upper Ossory in 1777. Inside the covers of one of the volumes (National Library of Ireland MS 1568) is the engraved ticket of ‘Wingrave & Collingwood, Bookbinders, no. 10 Red Lion Court, Fleet St.’ It appears from his advertisement on the flyleaf of NLI MS 1569, that Scalé had moved to England by this date: ‘Scalé & Co., Land Surveyors & Valuers of Estates, at Mangroves, near Brentwood, Essex.’
11 National Library of Ireland, MS 16, 135.
12 National Library of Ireland, MS 9839.
13 National Library of Ireland, MS 19, 025, 19.026.
14 National Library of Ireland, MS 21 F 11.
15 National Library of Ireland, MS Joly 37.
16 Illustrated in G St George Mark, Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, vol 19 nos 3 & 4 (July-Dec 1976), pp. 24, 44.
17 CIE Chief Engineer’s Office, Westland Row, Dublin; listed in M Craig, Irish Bookbindings 1600-1800 (London 1954), p. 36 no 169.
18 E McParland, Thomas Ivory, Architect (Ballycotton 1973), p. 7; For a recent account of the architecture of the former Blue Coat School, or King’s Hospital (The Hospital and Free-School of King Charles the Second, Dublin), see S O’ Reilly and N K Robinson, New Lease of Life, The Law Society’s Building at Blackhall Place (Dublin 1990).
19 The British Library, Department of Maps, 7 Tab 16; the volume is listed in M Craig (as note 17), p. 34, no 136.
20 National Library of Ireland, MS 2132.
21 University Library Cambridge, Hib. 4. 763. 3.; the binding probably dates from the late 1760s.
22 Private collection, Dublin.
23 John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London 1997)
24 W H G Bagshawe, The Bagshawes of Ford (1886), p. 291; F Taylor, ‘Johnsoniana from the Basgshawe papers in the John Rylands Library’; ‘Sir James Caldwell, Dr. Hawkesworth, Dr. Johnson, and Boswell’s use of the ‘Caldwell Minute’’, in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol 35, no 1 (Sept 1952), pp. 221-47; J B Cunningham, Castle Caldwell and its Families (Belleek 1980).
25 Taylor (as note 24), p. 214, note 3.
26 Quoted in Cunningham (as note 24), p. 81. Though never stated, the reason that Caldwell was denied a peerage by the Hanovarians was apparently due to his having accepted a title from Maria Theresa.
27 [John Almon]Biographical, Literary and Political Anecdotes of Several of the Most Eminent Persons of the Present Age, 3 vols (London 1797), vol 1, p. 120.
28 A number of finely-bound copies of the Debates in English bindings exist: Bagshawe (as note 22), p. 304, refers to the copy presented to King George III, quoting Caldwell, ‘His Majesty received from me in the most gracious manner the Irish Debates.’ This presumably is the copy now in the British Library with a dedication in MS by James Caldwell to the King: 286.a.19.20; George Simon, Earl of Harcourt’s copy, now in the National Library of Ireland, L.O. 2562/Bd; University Library of London (rubbing in the possession of Dr M Craig).
29 Aidan Heavey Collection, Dublin.
30 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, BE. 1.V.41, reproduced, but incorrectly described as English, in Otto Mazal, Europäische Einbandkunst aus Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Graz 1970), plate 242.
31 Private collection of Irish bindings, Dublin, previously in Sawyer’s Catalogue 225 (1954), no 46, subsequently owned by the firm of Murray Hill who sold it to the present owners in 1968.
32 Maggs Bros Catalogue 996 (1975), no 160.
33 National Library of Ireland, L.O. 2,723 (Joly bequest); the book label of John Weir is present on the front pastedown.
34 For Boulter Grierson’s binder, see M Craig (as note 17), pp. 17-18 and, more recently, J McDonnell, (as note 8), cat. nos 35-37. The bindings of the ‘Bible and Prayer Book binder’ as listed in cat. no 37 are all the products of Boulter Grierson’s binder: the ‘Bible and Prayer Book binder’ has no separate existence as I previously assumed.
35 J McDonnell & P Healy, Eighteenth-century Gold-tooled Bookbindings , commissioned by Trinity College Dublin, plates 92-95.
36 The first, a Book of Common Prayer (Dublin 1765), is bound in black goatskin with a central lozenge consisting of a few large tools (Private Collection of Irish bindings, Dublin).
37 A Manual of Instructions and Prayers useful to a Christian, Revised by Rev R Challoner, DD, Dublin, Printed by P Highly, no 1, Henry Street (1780). Private collection Dublin, acquired by the present owner from the antiquarian booksellers, Falkner Grierson in 1983; The Countess of Fingall later commissioned an elaborate binding for her Douai Bible (Dublin 1794) from the Abraham Bradley King shop, see J McDonnell, Ecclesiastical Art of the Penal Era. (Dublin 1995), no 78; the binding is illustrated in the Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, vol 17, nos 3 & 4 (July-Dec 1974).
38 Josiah Sheppard’s bindings have been discussed in J McDonnell, 500 years of the Art of the Book in Ireland (Dublin and London 1997), cat. no 38.