BARNARD, Alfred. The Whisky Distilleries of The United Kingdom. With illustrations and maps.

London: The Proprietors of “Harper’s Weekly Gazette”, 1887. Quarto. First edition. pp. xii, 457, [38 (Advertisement)]. Original pictorial green cloth over bevelled boards, pot-still in gilt to both covers. Half-tone frontispiece portrait of James Power facing the title; profusely illustrated with full-page and in-text wood-engravings and small maps, including Dublin distilleries such as John’s Lane and Bow Street. Spine professionally rebacked, preserving original backstrip. Ex libris Dublin Central Library with neat circular stamps. Frontispiece strengthened. Occasional spotting to prelims and advert leaves. Overall a good tovery good copy of this rare landmark work.
The author gives a lively account of the distilling industry at a time of change and growth in the late nineteenth century, with over 160 pen portraits of individual distilleries, embellished with fine illustrations. Originally published in 1887 by ‘Harper’s Weekly Gazette’, this work contains chapters on many Irish distilleries.
In this authoritative work, Alfred Barnard toured the industry in 1885/86 and recorded in unparalleled detail the plant, processes, water sources, output and personnel of every working distillery he could reach, 162 in Scotland, 29 in Ireland, and 4 in England, publishing the whole in 1887 as The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom. For Ireland the book preserves an eye-witness account of the great Dublin houses (Jameson, Power, Roe) at their Victorian zenith, together with provincial sites such as Midleton, Tullamore, Kilbeggan, Comber, Limavady, Birr, Bow Street, Bushmills, Dundalk, Glen, Johns’ Lane, Jones’ Road, Limerick, Nun’s Island, Tullamore, etc.
Barnard’s lively, almost journalistic narrative is matched by a wealth of engravings, exteriors, still-houses, worm tubs, mash tubs, granaries, which give the work enduring value for industrial historians and today’s distillers alike. Because many copies lived hard lives in office libraries and excise rooms, complete, unsophisticated examples of the 1887 first edition are increasingly difficult to obtain; it remained the standard reference until the centenary facsimile (1987) and is still the primary nineteenth-century source for the “golden age” of Irish and Scotch distilling.

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