Address-ing Firms; or, The Consequences of Our Own Actions

The WPHP Monthly Mercury

One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of partners and at various addresses over a number of months and years, and any number of other complex business and address relationships that our data struggles to capture.

Last fall, Kate worked with the WPHP address data for Dublin printer-publisher Alice Reilly—and the address data of the other printers, publishers, and booksellers she appeared in imprints with—to try and trace further material evidence of her labour. In theory, the project was simple and data-driven; in practice, it involved Kandice walking around Dublin filming a video and talking into her phone for an hour so Kate could see the streets she was studying, trying to establish where particular streets may have been located when the cityscape has shifted since the 1750s when Reilly was working, and ultimately had Kate thinking less about addresses and more about the embodiment of labour—Alice Reilly’s, Kandice’s, and her own.

In episode 3 of season 4 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Address-ing Firms,” join Kate and Kandice as they reflect on the realities of trying to capture this address information, including the decisions that they made for this particular work in 2018 (or was it 2017?) before they really knew what they were doing, what working with the address data for a research project looks like, and a thrilling audio glimpse of Kandice’s Alice-Reilly Dublin walk.