VIII.
AN EARLY DUBLIN ALMANACK.
By E. R. M'CLINTOCK DIX.
Plates XXX and XXXI.
Read May 22; Published August 10, 1916.
In submitting to the Academy the following particulars of a recent bibliographical discovery, I might preface my communication by observing that Bibliography is a subject for which no finality can be claimed. Notwithstanding the very great destruction of much of the early output of our presses, which every bibliographer must regret, still, from time to time, he is encouraged and rewarded by the discovery of a long-lost, and perhaps unrecorded, specimen.
In this instance the piece of printing which has again come to light in the city where it first appeared, after a lapse of 280 years, is a little Almanack, printed for the Company of Stationers, together with which there is a Prognostication, printed on a separate sheet, and having a separate title-page. Whether it originally appeared with any kind of cover I cannot say, but, when first acquired from Mr. Patrick McGrath, a dealer in old books, with whom I have been acquainted for some years, it was enclosed, clumsily stitched, in a temporary cover of a piece of cardboard. Seeing that the stitches were not contemporaneous, I cut them, and removed some inserted sheets, in no way connected with the subject-matter of the Almanack, that had evidently been sewn into the Almanack at a much later date; and thus I have been able to restore it to its original form, which is, roughly, what may be called a 16mo.
The Almanack consists of two sheets, folded in eights, without pagination. On the third page of the first sheet the signature "a 2" appears, and the signature "a 4" on p. 7. Page 17, that is the first page of the second sheet, bears the signature "b"; p. 19, or the third page of the second sheet, "b 2"; p. 21, "b 3"; and p. 23, "b 4"; and the Almanack is complete on the last page of this sheet, which would be p. 16 of it, or p. 32 of the whole.
