In this innovative volume, ten leading scholars from a variety of backgrounds examine how the production, circulation, and reception of books reflected Irish intellectual life. Through rigorous encounters with seminal works in their own particular fields-law, music, archaeology, Celtic studies, history, literary criticism, and art-the contributors explore how print and publishing impacted on the way ideas were shaped and spread in modern Ireland. These studies take the reader from the early modern elite literary coteries, and the restricted world of the hand press, to the commercial mass markets of 19th and 20th century Ireland. As a result of these changes, a social and intellectual world-at once international, and yet specifically Irish-emerges in which ideas were shaped by print, and in turn, shaped the role of the book in modern Ireland.