This innovative volume charts the impact of print and publishing in shaping the ideas that formed modern Ireland. 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, 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 nineteenth- and twentieth- 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.