Travelling Tinkers. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1951. First Edition. Pp, 22, untrimmed. Publisher’s gray printed wrappers; a fine bright copy.

Set and printed in an edition of 500 copies at The Dolmen Press, Dublin, and published on Gathering Day of Puck Fair, 1951 (100 signed copies in cloth, 400 unsigned in wrappers). This copy is one of the 400 in wrappers.

Contains The Ballad of the Tinker’s Wake, The Ballad of the Tinker’s Wife; The Ballad of the Tinker’s Son, The Ballad of the Tinker’s Daughter.

Liam Miller commented in An Illustrated Bibliography of the Dolmen Press: ‘The first book issued by the press was a small collection of ballads about Ireland’s travelling people. The establishment of the press, and our first publication, received a warm welcome and the little book sold out in a few weeks. This encouragement for our first effort made the continuation of the venture possible. The book was an extremely amateur piece of book production.’

Scarce and important work, being the first book published by this renowned publishing house. The Dolmen Press more than any other institution can claim to have been responsible for the upsurge in creative writing in Ireland during the second half of the century, both because of its founder’s (Liam Miller) craftsmanship and because of the encouragement he gave to emergent writers.