George Boole book bought at auction for €11k for UCC

It was quite literally all about the ones and the zeros as an auctioneer’s hammer fell at €11,000 for a signed first edition of a book by the father of modern technology — bought for University College Cork.

In fact, when fees and taxes are added, the total cost will be over €13,000 for the 1854 edition of George Boole’s An Investigation into the Laws of Thought.

However, it seems the cost will not be entirely borne by UCC, having had a little help when the gavel dropped on lot 276 in the Fonsie Mealy rare book auction in Dublin.

“We can confirm that UCC acquired the book with the assistance of an anonymous donor,” a spokesperson told the Irish Examiner.

Boole was the first professor of maths at what was then Queen’s College Cork, and the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1815 has been marked and highlighted globally by UCC over the past year.

Theories in the book inspired the binary code — based on ones and zeroes — that operates microchips and technology which run computers, phones, and other devices taken for granted today.

The book was written while English-born Boole was based in Cork and the copy sold yesterday bears his inscription: “Mrs. Hill with the Author’s respects.”

A signed first edition copy is already held in the strongroom of UCC’s Boole Library and has been used in exhibitions and other Boole 200 events during the past year.

One of the other top-priced lots in yesterday’s auction included plenty mid-19th century signatures, as an autograph album fetched €3,700 plus fees.

Among those whose notes, letters, and scribblings are entered in the collection are Queen Victoria, former British prime ministers Lord Palmerston and Robert Peel, and various statesmen, authors, and bishops. Among the military figures included are Lord Raglan, the ill-fated Crimean War commander, who signed “before Sevastapol” in 1854 — the same year Boole’s book was published.

A century-old hand-written poem in memory of Diarmuid O’Donovan Rossa, the west Cork Fenian who died in 1915, was sold for a €550 hammer price. It was penned by Brian O’Higgins, who went on to fight in Dublin’s GPO in the 1916 Rising and was later a Clare TD, and a prolific poet and publisher.

The centenary of O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin in August was the first State ceremonial event in the Ireland 2016 centenary programme.