How the Great Book of Ireland ended up at UCC
In the mid 1970s, the poet Theo Dorgan used to work in London during summers to pay for his university studies. In his spare time, he trawled the city’s museums. The sight of the original handwriting of great poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge – full of personality and energy almost two centuries on – always stayed with him.
In 1989, while working as director of Poetry Ireland, the memory of the Lake Poets’ handwriting was the seed for a plan Dorgan cooked up with Gene Lambert of Clashganna Mills. Why not round up the country’s finest poets and artists to create a Great Book of Ireland, a kind of modern-day version of the Book of Kells?
One that could survive for a thousand years as a time capsule with original handwriting and brushstrokes. Their idea might have been straightforward, but executing it was a different ball game.
“There were so many people who said at the time: ‘You’ll never do this. You’ll never get everybody to row in. And for nothing? You’re daft,’” says John FitzGerald, Chief Librarian, UCC.
Their budget was pittance: £25,000, which they cobbled together – including an interest-free loan from Ulster Bank – with donations from unlikely sources like the Swedish Embassy. None of the contributors (except the project’s calligrapher) got paid.
Among them were 121 artists, including Patrick Scott, Louis le Brocquy and Dorothy Cross; nine composers; celebrities (Bono and Daniel Day Lewis); and poets like Seamus Heaney as well as blow-ins, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and Allen Ginsberg.
The two-year journey to complete the book – along with an intriguing post-life in which it took over two decades to find a buyer for their “million pound book” – is captured in a wonderful documentary directed by Alan Gilsenan.
Its story is full of twists and turns and fascinating personal detail, including a captivating reminiscence by Sebastian Barry about the poem he contributed on his relationship with his “genius” younger brother who he hasn’t seen or heard from in the last decade.
Dorgan and John Montague inveigled Samuel Beckett to scrawl a poem on vellum (all the contributions were done on calfskin paper) in his Parisian nursing home two weeks before he died in 1989.
“If you look at the Beckett page, he scratched his opening out four times before he got it right,” says FitzGerald.
“The medieval manuscripts, upon which this book is based, were all designed to be thrown into saddle bags, to be hefted around the place. Similarly, the Great Book – if you were to see it now the front cover has a lot of wear. A lot of the pages are stained by human touch. There’s nothing antiseptic about it. It’s a very human thing.”
After its launch to great fanfare in 1991, Dorgan and Lambert were unable to find a buyer for their book. It spent years languishing in the vault of a bank until one day FitzGerald, who was working on behalf of UCC, asked his friend Dorgan during a chance encounter in Dublin about the book’s whereabouts.
“This is very weird. The Great Book is over there,” said Dorgan, pointing towards the AIB bank branch on Grafton Street.
UCC sourced a $1 million from philanthropists to buy the book in 2012. The money has been invested by Poetry Ireland to buy new premises for its headquarters. UCC plans to exhibit the book, as part of a treasures gallery in the Boole Library on its campus. It’s money well spent, says Fitzgerald.
“It’s an absolute steal. Just look at the names of the artists in particular. I remember when I was taking it to the United States [on funding trips] people used to say to me: ‘If you just took a blade to that book and cut all the images and sold them as original prints you’d make far more than a million dollars.’
“From my experience, the accumulated value of that book in years to come will range way beyond the intrinsic value of each page. Put together as one entity, it’ll be an irreplaceable icon of Irish culture and heritage. There will be nothing to compare to it. My mission is to bring its magic and beauty out into the public domain.”
The Great Book of Ireland documentary will premiere on RTÉ One, 10.10pm, Thursday, 20 August
