Cathach Books is a haven of first editions and signed copies. The owner explains to Eileen Battersby how the past became his future
More than 500 years of human existence have passed since the venerable folio I am looking at in a Dublin antiquarian bookshop, was printed. The date of that printing, in the infancy of the process, is 1493 - the year after Christopher Columbus discovered America. Time has left its traces on this ancient book. The original vellum spine is battered, the boards are loose, damp spots fleck the cover, a number of pages are missing, yet it has survived with its magnificence intact.
The text, written half a millennium ago in Latin by a German doctor, Hartman Schedel, accompanied by fabulous illustrations, woodcuts, the work of Michael Wolgemut and his then apprentice, the young Albrecht Dürer, along with Wolgemut's business partner, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, charts the history of the world from creation up until the end of the 15th century.
This is a first edition of the famous Nuremberg Chronicle, the Liber Chronicarum, printed in that pioneering German printing centre by Anton Koberger, Dürer's godfather, for Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister. It is the first printed and illustrated history of the world and is also the most illustrated book of the 15th century. The chronicle was recently purchased at auction by Cathach Books of Duke Street, Dublin which consists of a family trio of antiquarian book dealers; Éanna Mac Cuinneagáin, son David, and daughter Aisling.
To hold this book is to hold history in your hand. It is exciting and also slightly terrifying; it is to visit the Middle Ages with its specific world view. The medieval images include an early map of the world, as well as one of Europe. The creation story and individual stories of various saints are illustrated by the wood cuts. The religious is balanced by the secular.
Turning the pages stimulates that familiar museum/library sensation of wanting to memorise everything, to linger forever over each image while also racing on to the next so as not to miss any of the wonders. Here is a macabre Dance of Death series; other pages offer double-spread depictions of some 116 mainly European towns and cities such as Venice, Rome, Florence, Buda, Vienna, Prague, Cracow, Constance, Munich, Augsburg and Nuremberg. There is even a three-page entry on Ireland, dominated by the respective careers of saints Colum Cille, Patrick and Brigid.
The book dealers, father, son and daughter, look on with impressive composure, pleased with their successful bid at auction for this book of books which they intend to display, not sell on, as it is a book not held by any of the major Irish libraries. The firm is well accustomed to being in possession of rare and valuable texts such as several first, early and signed editions of Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Bram Stoker, Joyce, Beckett and, increasingly, Kinsella, Heaney and Montague as well as McGahern and Banville.
Initially Cathach's stock at its Duke Street premises was dominated by its antiquarian, archaeological and Irish language lists. In recent years, a strong literary element has also been introduced, with more novels, plays and poetry.
But the historical presence remains; W.E.H. Lecky, F.S.L. Lyons, R.L. Praeger, fascinating local histories and a fine selection of specialist antique maps continue to share shelf space with Joyce. Books are sourced at auction, through other dealers, by purchasing a private library or in a one-off purchase of a particular book presented for a potential sale at the counter.
Cathach Books is well named, after the Cathach of Colum Cille, the oldest surviving Irish illuminated manuscript, dated circa AD600. The association with Colum Cille is deliberate; Éanna Mac Cuinneagáin is most emphatically a Donegal man and he describes the sixth-century saint as one of Ireland's finest visionaries, alongside chronicler Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, one of the masters of the Annals of the Four Masters and the 19th-century scholar, John O'Donovan. Cuinneagáin, is, with series editor, archaeologist Michael Herity, currently republishing the Ordnance Survey letters through their Four Masters imprint. Kilkenny, the sixth volume in the letters series, is the most recently published one.
Born in Carrick, 10 miles west of Killybegs, in 1927, the eldest of a family of eight, Mac Cuinneagáin is the son of J.W. ... Cunningham, a builder, who established a famous Co Donegal family building firm which served the north-west for some 40 years. J.W. Cunningham, and his father, W.J. Cunningham, a master carpenter, regarded building as a vocation and a vital element in the establishment of any community. To his father, Mac Cuinneagáin owes his passion for books; to both his father and grandfather he attributes his love of building and, most specifically, of doing a job, any job, right.
Although he trained as a teacher, the young Éanna - or Enda, as most book-buyers would know him - always loved the building business and refers to the five years he spent building, while already a qualified primary teacher, as "the happiest of my life".
A building slump in 1957 led to his return to teaching. But why did a Co Donegal school teacher - a man who seems so bonded to his native county where he had first begun selling books with a suitcase of texts bought as a job lot - decide to establish an antiquarian book shop in Dublin? "That's a long story," he says, "a very long story." His reply is expected. Mac Cuinneagáin, is quiet and thoughtful, with the face of a sage and the demeanour, but none of the pedantry of a teacher. He gives the impression he has a story to tell.
"I had been principal of the school in Teelin for some 15 years, although through my wife's business I was already selling books. It was decided to amalgamate Teelin School with the village school at Carrick which is about three miles away. When the principal of that school retired, I assumed I would get the principalship of Carrick school. In my capacity as chairman of the village council, I had many plans for its development as part of a development project for the area."
Unfortunately the parish priest intervened. "Rev McDyer appointed the principal's son, who was at that time only four years qualified as a teacher, while I had some 30 years' experience on my side. I decided there was no future for me at home in Donegal, so I left."
The decision to move to Dublin in 1979 at the age of 52, not only broke his heart, it affected the community, as it lost the services of his wife, Vera, a pharmacist upon whom 3,500 local people had come to depend. "We were happy there. We had the pharmacy; we also sold local hand crafts. I had set up Cathach Books in 1959, and was already issuing catalogues and dealing in antiquarian books." The couple and their five children settled in Glasnevin.
Mac Cuinneagáin took up the principalship of St Gabriel's School in Aughrim Street, where one of his three daughters, Eugenie, still teaches. "It was a Dublin inner-city school in which all of the pupils were from council flat developments in the area. The area had no facilities. It was rife with drugs, alcohol-related problems and crime. The mothers in these areas were wonderful, I respected them for the way they coped in appalling circumstances. A lot of the boys were facing poor futures. Two of the lads I was teaching were high on drugs and at that time I'd never heard of drugs."
In order to give the boys some practical employment opportunity, he introduced cookery sessions through Cathal Brugha Street and electrical lessons run by ESB apprentices. Meanwhile, students from the College of Art soon had the pupils participating in painting a vast Viking-theme mural in the school hall. Vandalism at the school ended. About 30 inner city schools had formed a group. "We were funded by the Government to travel to Glasgow and see a similar inner city schools project organised through Strathclyde University. We saw in action what we were proposing for Dublin. Wecame back full of enthusiasm and had an appointment with the then minister for education, Gemma Hussey, to report to her on our findings. She said, 'Before you read out your report I want to read you a letter from the INTO'."
In the letter, the organisation made it clear that only the INTO had the authority to deal with the problems in Dublin schools. "This was despite the fact I kept it informed of every stage of our efforts." He was devastated. "I had a breakdown and spent six months in hospital. After that, I was granted early retirement and decided to pursue my love of books." By 1986 he was operating a small shop in the George's Street Arcade.
Two years later he moved the business to Duke Street, where he established the family firm in partnership with David and Aisling.
In 2000 he wrote a history of his family, for his family. "You might like to have a look at it," he said. It is a vivid, beautifully written chapter of Irish social history. As well as giving his account of the family history, and that of the building firm, the booklet also contains a remarkable document, a statement written by his father for the Military History Bureau. In it, James Cunningham outlines his activities as a gun-running member of the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) while working in England as a joiner in the early 1920s (see panel).
Long before reaching the paragraph in which Cunningham senior recalls sitting in a Dublin pub ("I saw a tall, athletic-looking man cycle right into the bar, leaving his bicycle at the side of the counter ... it was then I realised I was in the presence of the great Michael Collins.") the reader will be spellbound. Éanna Mac Cuinneagáin is aware of this, and agrees his father was quite a character.
Earlier the book dealer, who is committed to local history and republished T.C. McGinley's 1840s classic, Cliff Scenery of South-Western Donegal, in 1999, mentioned a further ambition: "I'd love to publish the Ordnance Survey Place Name books."
These texts had been typed out by a team of women organised by the Republican activist priest, Father Michael O'Flanagan in the 1920s. The books in their current typed format run to more than 120 volumes so it would be quite a project. "It's very important stuff," says Mac Cuinneagáin. "That Father O'Flanagan was a great man, he knew the importance of heritage."
