the book collector
has ever been undertaken and as a result historical references to the work contain errors and misunderstandings. James Weatherup (1856–1935) and his wife Emily Alberta (Wallace) had a family of eight children, including Elizabeth and Margaret (‘Peggy’) and son Edwin who were christened with the additional forename Blow after their ancestor James Blow who worked the first printing press in Belfast. 3 Weatherup’s surviving box of book collecting ephemera includes booklists, local auction catalogues, his own library catalogue, and correspondence – all bearing witness to the classic symptoms of an inveterate book col- lector. The birth certificates of two of his sons (dated 1910 and 1913 respectively) state their father’s profession as ‘Coal Merchant’, as does his entry in the 1901 Census. How the Book was Discovered and Identified In a letter to his son Arthur (8 August 1933) James Weatherup stated that he had purchased the book for one penny. In the 1980s his son recalled that his father came across it in a box on the street outside Hugh Greer’s old bookshop in Wellington Place – but that address was a more recent location for the shop. The Greers have long been known in Belfast since Henry Greer first advertised his bookshop in North Street in 1819. Over the decades the location of the shop moved several times and throughout the 1920s and 1930s annual catalogues were issued from the ‘Cathedral Book Store, 18 Gresham Street Belfast, Hugh Greer Bookseller’ – a typical pro- vincial second-hand bookshop containing mostly Victorian books relating to Ireland and of local interest. The shop window was crammed with books, portable bookshelves either side of the door, a bench below the window and even a few larger books sitting on the ground beneath. It was the ideal sort of place where a local book collector could rummage through a box of damaged old books at a penny each, scrutinize the annual catalogue, and scour the shelves for a prize addition to his library. An eminent Belfast antiquarian book- 3 . James Blow and Patrick Neill set up the first Belfast press in 1694. James Weatherup’s library included a printed history of James Blow and his ancestors, and a very rare por- trait of his son the printer Daniel Blow ( c .1720–1810) – the descent from James Blow is via James Weatherup’s wife and her family the Wallaces.
742
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter