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By Root 1935 0

breach this custom. A"Shark," Richardson called such a man, who "preyed on his own Kind." And it was the breaching of this norm, not the act of reprinting per se, that the Dubliners denominated "piracy." For example, James Hoey was accused in 1734 of reprinting a Dublin-printed work called The Toy-Shop "in a Pyratical Manner, a Method not at all uncommon to said Gentleman." Isaac Jackson's Irish-made Reading made easy (a scriptural primer) appeared in "Five or Six Piratical Impressions," such that Jackson was forced to sell off his own impression at cost. Such breaches occurred with a frequency that seems broadly comparable to that in London. Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides saw four editions in just one year, some of them queasily disguised with false "London" imprints. By 1778 accountancy books were being produced with the author's signature in each copy to deter such domestic piracies.26

Abraham Bradley gave the Quaker Thomas Cumming a blunt piece of testimony as to a Dubliner's helplessness in such situations:

he had once gave a Sum of Money for a London Copy, and some of his Brothers in Trade came modestly to him and demanded a share in the Sale but absolutely declined being a Farthing Sharers in the Money he gave for the Copy! Look ye here, said they, as you gave so many Guineas for it you must sell it at-or you must be a Loser; but as we shall immediately advertise that we sh. all publish and sell it at-, you know the Publick will wait till ours comes out; yours willlie on yourHands, and ours willgo off, and we, who paid noth. ingbut for Paper and printing must get Money. 27

None of the moral legitimacy that might attach to international reprinting applied to cases like these. Theywere, andwere seen as, major offenses that spoiled the good names of those perpetrating them. More seriously, reprinting a brother's titles contravened the trade's image of itself as a self-ordering craft. So the community felt able to appeal to its own and its customers' moral compasses to reject these "unfair Dealings." Their perpetrators were decried as having expelled themselves from a civil community- Ciceronian pirates indeed. The pirate Hoeywas denounced as simply "unfit for Human Society."28

As in other European towns, the civil community of the Dublin book trade had an institutional form in the shape of a guild. It was a peculiarly weak one, however. Its weakness derived from its origin in seventeenthcentury conflicts. Briefly, prior to the civil wars only the king's printer for Ireland had been authorized to operate there. London's Stationers' Company had taken over that privilege, allegedly so that its booksellers could have a source of cheap labor. At the Restoration, the appointment of new royal printers led to a long, complex, and multilateral struggle between old and new patentees, between monopoly and trade, and between craft and prerogative. It shared many of the characteristics of the patents contest playing out in the same years in London itself. In 1670 the king intervened to call a halt to it. He forced the competing groups into one "body politique," the Guild of St. Luke, alongside the two other "faculties" of cutlers and painter-stainers. This did not really end the feud, but from then on it was the guild that claimed to uphold the craft's order.29 On paper, it was well equipped to do so. It had many of the powers and responsibilities of such bodies in general, and a "Council of the House," roughly corresponding to the court of assistants in London, met in camera once a month to deal with disputes. But in practice, as far as we can tell, policing was neglected, and most of the council's business involved mundane questions of apprenticeship and freedom.30 The most persistent problems it faced related to the perennial issue of craft identity (the problem of identifying and eliminating hawkers, "intruders," or "foreigners"), overlain by Ireland's religious politics (Catholics were admitted only as "quarter brothers," meaning that they paid for the "Priviledg" of being allowed to practice their craft).31 In 1767 it finally