Pollard, Mary ('Paul')

by Charles Benson

Pollard, Mary ('Paul') (1922–2005), librarian, was born 5 June 1922 in Essex, the eldest of four children (three daughters and a son) of an emigrant Irish doctor, Richard Payne Pollard, MC, and his wife (née Wilkinson). She was educated at Hawnes School and then studied medicine for several years, but abandoned this career shortly before completing the course and turned to librarianship. While studying for the associateship of the Library Association she was employed at Southlands Teacher Training College, now a part of the University of Roehampton (formerly, University of Surrey at Roehampton).

She came to Dublin in 1957, joining Marsh's Library on 1 August in a part-time capacity and Trinity College Library also in a part-time role five days later. While Marsh's Library could not afford to pay her a proper salary, it did supply her with a (distinctly cold) flat underneath the library, which she retained all her life. She spent eight years working in the two jobs before moving to a full-time post in Trinity. From the outset she specialised in early printed books and by 1964 was designated Trinity's rare book librarian. She was already engaged in research, and her dissertation, 'The woodcut ornament stocks of the Dublin printers 1551–1700 with lists of unsigned works identified as from their presses', for fellowship of the Library Association was approved 'with a mark of distinction'.

As part of the works connected with the building of the New (now Berkeley) Library, the east pavilion of the Old Library was reconstructed and the department of older printed books, with Paul Pollard in charge, opened to readers in 1968. Conditions were austere, resources scarce, and it was furnished with tables and chairs redundant to other parts of the college. A carpet was out of the question. The department's brief covered pre-1800 printed books, although the Old Library also contained a mass of nineteenth-century books. The remit was gradually extended to cover the entire contents of the Long Room and Gallery. Despite very meagre allowances for purchases, Paul Pollard made huge improvements to the library's generally rather staid antiquarian stock. She identified as particularly poor the library's existing holdings of eighteenth-century English language, literature and drama, and of Irish economic, social and political works, and she worked to remedy the deficiencies. Occasionally, money became available from external sources; the extensive purchases of Swift and Swiftiana at the T. A. Hollick sale at Sotheby's in 1976 were made possible by funds provided by the trustees of the estate of Chester Beatty (qv).

In managing the department in the library she brought intellectual rigour to the cataloguing of early printed books. Building on the Anglo-American cataloguing rules, then recently adopted in the library, she developed in 1970 a supplementary code of cataloguing designed to present in the catalogue entry the results of analysis of all physical aspects of a book. In tandem with this she began informal teaching of historical bibliography to academics and postgraduates which led to the inclusion of a course in historical bibliography as part of the M.Phil. in reformation and enlightenment studies. As part of the course she established a hand press, Trinity Closet Press, which eventually found a home in the basement of the College Printing House.

Her stature in the library was marked by her appointment as sub-librarian in 1970 and as the first keeper of early printed books in 1980, a post from which she retired in 1983 to pursue her research on the Dublin book trade. The fruits of this were published in two books. The first, Dublin's trade in books, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 1989), came out of the Lyell lectures which she delivered in Oxford University in 1986–7, and this was followed by the magisterial A dictionary of members of the Dublin book trade, 1550–1800 (London, 2000). The two works provide a comprehensive view of the organisation and personnel of the trade.

In the early 1960s, with the assistance of Liam Miller, she established her own hand press in a disused room in Marsh's Library. For twenty years she published in very limited editions verse satires on contemporary events and prose squibs. Her private passion was her collection of pre-1914 children's books. In the course of fifty years she assembled an outstanding collection of some 11,500 items which almost took over her flat. In collecting, she had an emphasis on books for girls and on Irish material. She bequeathed the collection to Trinity College Library. Her collecting notebooks for fifty years form part of the collection.

She received an honorary D.Litt. from Dublin University in 2001 and was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2002. A Festschrift, That woman!: studies in Irish bibliography, was published in 2005, shortly before her death on 24 June 2005.