A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667/Bourke (Thomas)

by Henry Robert Plomer

BOURKE (THOMAS), printer at Waterford and Kilkenny, Ireland, 1643-48. The authorised official printer of the Catholic Confederation. Sir J. T. Gilbert describes him as a "native printer." In 1643 he is found at Waterford, where he continued until 1645, when he appears to have moved to Kilkenny, where in that year was printed Henry Burkhead's A tragedy of Cola's Furie or Lirenda's Miserie, of which there is a unique copy in the British Museum. The books that came from the Kilkenny press bore no printer's name, but Bourke's name is found on a broadside printed there entitled Declaration by the Confederate Catholics' Council, 1648. [Library N.S., October, 1901. Irish Provincial Printing, by E. R. McC. Dix.]