Archbishop Marsh''s Library
Just outside the main entrance of St Patrick's Cathedral is a compact Georgian building, faced in brick at the front but, tactfully, in the same unrelenting grey stone as the cathedral on the side that faces the church. This is Archbishop Marsh's Library (Mon & Wed-Fri 10am-12.45pm & 2-5pm, Sat 10.30am-12.45pm; GBP1/?1.27 donation is expected), Ireland's first public library, built in 1701 (by Sir William Robinson, who also designed the Royal Hospital Kilmainham) and given to the city by the wonderfully named Archbishop Narcissus Marsh. Inside, the tiny reading cubicles and the dark carved bookcases carrying huge leather-bound tomes - some 25,000 of them, most dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; the earliest a Latin manuscript of 1400 - can hardly have changed since the library was built. The library was peppered with bullets during the 1916 rising, and some of the seventeenth-century volumes are marked by British Army bullets intended for the nearby Jacob's factory which was a rebel stronghold. The single most important collection in the library is that of Edward Stillingfleet, Archbishop of Worcester. His 10,000 books were bought for GBP2,500 and include works from some of the earliest English printers, including Berthelet, Daye and Fawkes. Archbishop Marsh - of whom Swift remarked that "no man will be either glad or sorry at his death" (the dean believed that it was Marsh's fault he had not risen higher in his ecclesiastical career) - was responsible for the preparation of the first translation of the Old Testament into Irish, and two of the volumes survive in the library. The chains that once protected the books from theft are long gone, but three lock-in cages for readers of rare books survive; although today it's more likely you'll sit in the main office under the watchful eye of the librarian.
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