Taylor, George / Skinner, Andrew. Taylor and Skinner’s Maps of the Roads of Ireland. Surveyed 1777. First Edition. London & Dublin, Published by the Authors as the Act directs 14th Nov. 1778. 26 x 15 cm. Large folded map of Ireland, engraved title page, xvi, 288 numbered strip maps, 16 pages of Subscribers. Complete. Later dark green half morroco over cloth. Raised bands. Title, authors and publishing year in gilt. Gilt line decorations. Top edge gilt. Later marbled end papers and single blanks to front and rear. Very good condition. Binding rubbed and bumped with minor abrasions (see images). Small sticker with name and address of previous owner on front paste down. Paper label on front paste down (‘Kildare Street Club’ with a Note: ‘Presented by Howard Guinness, Esq.’). Large folding map neatly repaired / reinforced. Internally very clean.

First Edition of the “most accurate road representation of Ireland of the period”, containing strip maps engraved by Garnet Terry of some 8000 miles of roads surveyed by the authors in 1777. The maps show topographic features and the names and locations of the estates of the more prominent local gentry whose names are also recorded. The index lists the roads leading from Dublin and other locations with distances in Irish and British miles. Chubb p. 411 #XI. Smith, Maps and Plans for the Local Historian and Collector, p. 120.

Provenance Howard Guinness: Possibly Dr Howard Guinness, who was a member of the influential Irish brewing family and the grandson of the missionary Henry Grattan Guinness. He trained in medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, but never practiced. He travelled to Australia in 1930, having been sent by Inter-Varsity Fellowship to develop Christian student groups on university campuses, and helped to establish the Sydney University and Melbourne University Evangelical Unions. In 1938 he married Barbara Green and was ordained in 1940. In 1949 he became Rector of St Barnabas Broadway, and then St Michael’s Vaucluse in 1957. He died in Wentworth Falls, NSW.
The Kildare Street Club is a historical member’s club in Dublin, Ireland, at the heart of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy.
The Club remained in Kildare Street between 1782 and 1977, when it merged with the Dublin University Club to become the Kildare Street & University Club, moving to the University Club’s 1776 premises at number 17 on the North side of St Stephen’s Green. Its second Kildare Street clubhouse, built between 1859 and 1860, has not been disposed of but is now leased to a Heraldic Museum and the Alliance Française.
In Parnell and his Island (1887), George Moore wrote scathingly of the club:
″The Kildare Street Club is one of the most important institutions in Dublin. It represents in the most complete acceptation of the word the rent party in Ireland; better still, it represents all that is respectable, that is to say, those who are gifted with an oyster-like capacity for understanding this one thing: that they should continue to get fat in the bed in which they were born. This club is a sort of oyster bed into which all the eldest sons of the landed gentry fall as a matter of course. There they remain spending their days, drinking sherry, and cursing Gladstone in a sort of dialect, a dead language which the larva-like stupidity of the club has preserved. The green banners of the League are passing, the cries of a new Ireland awaken the dormant air, the oysters rush to their window – they stand there open-mouthed, real pantomime oysters, and from the corner of Frederick Street, a group of young girls watch them in silent admiration”.

• Keywords: Classical & Old Literature · Fine Bindings & Editions · Fine Bindings & Editions · History & Culture · History of Ireland · Ireland · Maps & Atlases · Reference · Reference · Transport & Travel · Travel & Exploration
• Language: English
• First edition
• Inventory Number: 103782AB

Our price: EUR 2.000,--