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The Rome Irish type

After the Louvain type, the second true Irish type, cast in 1638 in Rome at the College of Saint Isidore. View a sample of its use in Lochrann na gCreidmheach by Fr. Francis O Molloy here. Brendan Leen writes about it: "Not dissimilar to the Louvain type, the Rome Irish type nonetheless represents a marked improvement on its predecessor. The letters have sloughed all of the vestiges of the ligature; now, they compose in a more vertical and distinct manner on the page. [...] On a "visit" to Italy in the early nineteenth century, Napoleon requisitioned the Rome Irish type for the National Print Museum of the Republic, the Imprimerie Nationale. The type was used by the Paris printer J.J. Marcel in the 1804 production of Alphabet Irlandais. [...] The Rome Irish type had been just one of an array of exotic punches pillaged in Italy and transported to the Imprimerie at the beginning of 1801; in an effort to obtain from the Propaganda samples of a range of foreign letters to complete the magnificent Paris collection, boxes of Arabic, Armenian, Brahmanic, Chaldaic, Coptic, Hebrew, Georgian, German Greek, Irish, Illyrian, Indian, Malabar, Persian, Ruthenian, Syriac and Tibetan had been unceremoniously looted and shipped northward. Ultimately, the original punches and matrices of the Rome Irish type were returned under threat of violence by the commissioners of the Tuscan Government."

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