Cultural Record Keepers: The Belfast Library and Society for Promoting Knowledge

Bookplates courtesy of Linen Hall Library, Belfast.

The "worthy plebeians" of the Belfast Reading Society established a subscription library in the economically and intellectually ambitious town of Belfast, Ireland, in May 1788 in the Enlightenment spirit of self-improvement through education. The Linen Hall Library remains the oldest library in Belfast and the last subscription library in Ireland. At its founding, despite the radical political views of several of its members, the society chose to remain officially apolitical and nonsectarian, a position it would retain throughout its existence.¹ The library was housed in a number of temporary, inadequate buildings until 1802, when the proprietors of the town's White Linen Hall offered a room to the library at no expense. The sprawling hall had been built in 1784 for white linen producers in the province of Ulster to market linen locally rather than in Dublin. Although the Belfast Reading Society had changed its official name to the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge in 1792 and would become the Belfast Library and Society for Promoting Knowledge in 1837, with its move into the White Linen Hall it became popularly and affectionately known as the Linen Hall Library. It would occupy these new quarters for the next ninety years. In these gorgeous premises the society's collection steadily grew, expanding into adjoining rooms, and members built enriching reciprocal relationships with local civic and scholarly bodies. Evicted from the White Linen Hall in 1892 in advance of its demolition for a new city hall, the library found a new home at its present location, ironically a former linen warehouse, on the northeast corner of Donegall Square North and Fountain Street.²

The documentation and preservation of Irish history and culture have always been a special mission of the library. It attempted to revive the art of the Irish harp with a four-day festival in 1792 and sponsored the publication of traditional Irish airs collected in Edward Bunting's thrice-revised Ancient Irish Music (1796). It supported an Irish Harp Society and held another popular harp festival in 1903. Its books on Irish subjects were consolidated to form a special Irish collection in 1893. Although the Linen Hall Library did not share the assertive nationalism of the numerous partisan reading rooms in nineteenth-century Ireland, the Celtic cultural revival still affected the outlook of the Linen Hall Library, as reflected in the design of its bookplate.³

John Vinycomb, the designer of the bookplate, was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England on July 4, 1833, and studied at the Government School of Design there under William Bell Scott, the Scottish Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet. After an apprenticeship as an engraver, he moved to Belfast in 1855 to join the rising printing firm of Marcus Ward & Co., which had begun to distinguish itself for its color lithography. Vinycomb eventually rose to become the artistic director of the firm, famous for its sumptuous work with Christmas cards, stationery, calendars, bookplates, and illuminated presentation addresses.⁴ He became Ulster's foremost expert in the subtle language of heraldry, publishing Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (1906). Vinycomb's more than two hundred specimens of bookplate art weighed heavily with heraldic designs, but he escaped the formalism and rigidity common to the genre with a brilliantly heightened level of detail, depth, and shadow. He also produced bookplates with less pretentious outdoor, scholarly, and antiquarian images reflective of his clients' unique personalities, interests, and avocations. He compressed his great knowledge of the technical processes of bookplate production in On the Processes for the Production of Ex Libris (Book-Plates) (1894).⁵

Vinycomb eventually left Belfast in April 1900 after Marcus Ward went into dissolution, settling in nearby Holywood to specialize in heraldic crests and illuminated addresses as a freelance artist. He was elected an honorary member of the Linen Hall Library in 1904 "for eminence in literature and art" and repaid the compliment by designing an ex...