Irish Parliamentary Bookbindings Revisited Exhibition

In August and September 2026, the Irish Georgian Society in partnership with the Office of Public Works will host an exhibition that will explore the destruction and recreation of the Irish Parliamentary Bookbindings.

Commissioned for the eighteenth century Irish Parliamentary Journals, the original bookbindings were destroyed following an explosion and fire in the Public Record Office in Dublin at the start of the Civil War in 1922. However, fortuitously, wax rubbings and photographs were taken of the bindings by the book collector Sir Edward Sullivan. These invaluable records later featured in Maurice Craig’s Irish Bookbindings 1600-1800 (London: Cassell, 1954) which in turn inspired the Radiation Oncologist and book collector Dr Philip Maddock who, in the 1990s, began to compile a visual database of Irish bookbinding hand tools.

With this database, Maddock commissioned new brass tools and worked with the bookbinder Trevor Lloyd to bind a total of 15 examples of the Irish parliamentary bindings. These featured in a Dublin Castle exhibition in 2017 from which a selection will be presented in this year’s City Assembly House exhibition.