SOME museums seem slightly at odds with their surroundings. There is a certain tension, for example, between the 300-year-old Royal Hospital Kilmainham and its latter-day tenant, the Irish Museum of Modern Art. By complete contrast, the National Print Museum and the building that houses it are a perfect fit, writes Frank McNally.
Well, maybe "fit" is not exactly the right word. As its collection has expanded in recent years, the NPM could now fill a building twice the size of the old garrison church in Dublin's Beggars Bush barracks, where it currently resides. But the trappings of religion, at least, are entirely apt.
The publishing industry may have moved a long way from its origins. It frequently incurs the wrath of the pulpit, God knows. Yet to this day, its trade unions are still organised in "chapels" - a vestige of the time when William Caxton founded the first one at Westminster in 1476.
As recently as last month, journalists at The Irish Timeselected a new "father of chapel" (shop steward to you); although it hardly needs adding that this has long been an equal-opportunity position. A few votes the other way, in fact, and we would have had a mother.
Beggars Bush itself has a certain religious resonance. I believe the name derives from association with the mendicant friars who once begged for alms in certain parts of cities. But any connection between mendicants and printers ends there.
The old print unions were among the most powerful of the genre and - no coincidence - their members were well paid. Conditions in the industry were relatively good too. An antique banner hanging over the NPM collection recalls one of many famous victories, in 1788, when London bookbinders secured a one-hour reduction in their working day.
Nearby, a smaller exhibit hints at how the print unions retained that power. An indenture for a printer's apprentice, dated 1935, it bound one Christopher Kelly from Marino - "of his own free will and with the consent of his father" - to seven years' service with a firm in Dublin's Talbot Street. If the document was serious, he was in for a quiet life.
For the duration of the apprenticeship, it promised his masters that he would "their secrets keep, and their lawful commands everywhere gladly do". He would neither "commit fornication, nor contract matrimony". He would not play "cards, dice-tables, or any unlawful games". And finally, he would not "haunt or use taverns, ale-houses, or play-houses." For all this monk-like restraint, he would receive a starting wage of 10 shillings a week, rising to 45 shillings by the seventh year - not bad money in 1935.
Despite the unions' tight control on membership, the printing industry was the Republic's fourth largest in 1961, though within a generation, computers would hasten the end of the old skills and the industrial power that went with them.
Of course, most of the NPM collection is composed of heavy - and, since all machines are still in working order, occasionally hot - metal. They range from the old manual tools, with which a compositor assembled text one letter at a time (minding his Ps and Qs), to the modern Ludlow Typecaster, used to produce newspaper headlines until the mid-1980s.
In between, there are such quaint curiosities as the machine that once lined your old school copybooks. And on a poignant note, the collection also includes the last hot-metal front page of the Sunday Press, from 1985, with a lead story by somebody called Geraldine Kennedy. Whatever happened to her? Oddly enough, the museum's prize exhibit is, by professional printing standards, a botched job. Then again, the 1916 Proclamation was produced in rather straitened circumstances. And if you happen to have an original copy now, as the NPM does (on loan), it may be worth more than your house.
James Connolly's printing difficulties began when the supplier he originally contacted was raided and lost almost all his type. A friendly English printer made up some of the deficiency. But by Easter Sunday it had become clear there were not enough letters to do the whole document in one go. It would have to be a proclamation of two halves.
Even at that, the finished article is full of quirks that you'll appreciate better after a tour of the museum. The first challenge for the printers was the number of Os in the headline, which meant that in the last line ("To The People of Ireland"), they had to use two different fonts. A third type of O appears to have been amended to provide the "C" in "Republic". And a capital "E" was really an F, converted with sealing wax.
Then there are the lower case "e"s. According to John O'Connor's book The 1916 Proclamation, there are 131 correct "e"s in the document's top half, after which the compositors ran out and had to use 23 "e"s of another type. Connolly originally planned 2,500 copies (for when the Rising spread), but had only enough paper for 1,000. Also, the paper was bargain-basement stuff, not designed to survive long outdoors. Hence the rarity of good-quality original copies today.
Possibly the most popular aspect of the NPM, at least for school tours, is the bit where visitors get their names printed by a manual compositor. The museum also boasts a reference library, shop, exhibition space, and café. It opens seven days a week: 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday, and 2-5pm at weekends. The website is www.nationalprintmuseum.ie.