'The buzzing cultural activity of bourgeois Cork - a society of book-lovers, educationalists and philosophers," is a visitor's description of the 19th-century city but could have described the attendance at UCC's launch of Old World Colony; Cork and South Munster 1630-1830 by David Dickson of Trinity College Dublin.
Published by Cork University Press, the massive book is the result of more than 30 years' research and was introduced by historian Tom Dunne as "a landmark in Irish historical scholarship".
It may well be, but the chances are that but for Cork 2005 plc it wouldn't have been a landmark in anything for perhaps another 30 years. Someone in there had the idea of subsidising quality productions by the city's leading publishers. In this case the grant to CUP (unlike the crucial €65,000 given to the acclaimed European Quartet Week which ended on Saturday) was only €8,000, but that contribution is understood to have ensured the book's publication. In fact, Cork 2005 is believed to have promised the same amount to the production costs of each of CUP's two forthcoming publications, an investment which allows a very high degree of editorial and visual finesse and ensures a lasting dividend in terms of shelf-life.
With estimated publishing costs of €25,000 for Old World Colony, the grant also meant a comparatively reasonable retail price of €49 and guaranteed, as Tom Dunne said, that CUP could achieve "what any university press has to try to achieve - the matching of academic excellence with publishing excellence".
Welcoming this "most ambitious book" and noting Dickson's mention of members of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society as an "act of pietas" Emeritus Professor John A Murphy also noted the forthcoming sale of the famous landscape painting, A View of Cork by Jonathan Butts which, he said, "we now seem likely to lose, ironically, in this year of culture".
