ONE OF Ireland’s most important 18th-century private libraries is to be broken up and sold off next week in Dublin.
Hundreds of rare books, collected by a Tipperary landowner and politician some 250 years ago, will be auctioned individually, in a sale expected to raise up to €250,000.
Richard Moore (1716-1771), who lived at Barne House near Clonmel and was high sheriff for Tipperary, was an avid book collector and acquired hundreds of volumes. The collection has remained in the house and in the family’s ownership ever since, but has now been consigned for sale to Mealy’s.
The library is known as the Ricardi Moore Collection because Moore wrote his first name in Latin on the fly-leaf of each book.
Auctioneer Fonsie Mealy, who is also president of the RDS, said “this is an extremely important collection” and the most significant auction of an Irish gentleman’s library in decades.
Illustrated Indian manuscripts, rare maps and almanacs also feature in the sale.
Highlights include a first edition of The General History of the Air, published in 1692 by Irish scientist Robert Boyle, which is expected to sell for over €2,000. A copy of the three-volume New Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America by Benjamin Franklin and published in 1754 is estimated to be worth €3,500-€5,000.
