THE GALLERY PRESS

Beginnings
Even then the purpose was praise. It began in innocence, long ago. In 1970, in fact. On 6 February 1970 the first Gallery Book appeared - a simple offering. Another followed, and another. People started to call me a publisher. There was no plan, no fixed aim (no money!). There was a hope, and it grew, bit by bit. Over the years those fledgling impulses became a mission - to launch and foster the careers of exceptional new writers, to assert and promote the dignity of the profession of writing, to demonstrate that we could produce and publish editions of poems and plays as well as anyone, and to provide a publishing home in Ireland for Irish writers.
Now, nearly thirty-five years later, more than three hundred titles, marked by careful editing and simple, elegant design, record the achievement of Ireland's outstanding established and emerging literary figures. The Gallery Press is recognized at home and abroad, along with the Cuala and Dolmen presses, as the pre-eminent publisher of Irish writing in the 20th century. It bears the same standards into a new millennium.

The Gallery

The list includes acknowledged masterpieces. A series of Collected Poems (by John Montague, Derek Mahon, Richard Murphy, Pearse Hutchinson and Michael Hartnett) has been welcomed as contemporary classics. It features two dozen plays by Brian Friel as well as titles by Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

Other highlights of the list include the poems of Ciaran Carson, Eamon Grennan, Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, the plays of Marina Carr and Thomas Kilroy, a list of outstanding women poets (including Kerry Hardie), the compendia of Michael Coady, and the occasional trawl through tradition in which younger poets present the case for older masters (Vona Groarke for Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Seamus Heaney for Padraic Fallon, Michael Longley for W R Rodgers, Derek Mahon for Patrick MacDonogh, David Wheatley for James Clarence Mangan).

The Gallery Press has pioneered the practice of bilingual editions (notably three collections of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill with a galaxy of sympathetic translations). Other translations and adaptations represent modern and classic work, from Aristophanes, Euripides and Virgil, through Rostand, Molière, Ibsen, Kleist and Chekhov, to St John Perse and Jaccottet and the multifacetted array of Pearse Hutchinson's Done into English.

Intermittent publications of prose present the selected stories of Brian Friel and Tom Mac Intyre, the early fiction of John Banville, and a selection of essays by Dennis O'Driscoll.

The Future

Younger poets such as Vona Groarke, John McAuliffe, Conor O'Callaghan, Justin Quinn and Peter Sirr will carry the torch into the future, and now, having enlisted poets younger than the press itself (Alan Gillis, David Wheatley), that future glows.

The Gallery Press operates out of a small, 19th-century stone house and its adjacent outbuildings, in the ancient centre of North Meath. With views across sheep pastures to the crests of the Loughcrew hills and their ancient megalithic cairns (3000 BC), a long tradition continues. Respectful of Ireland's rich literary past, The Gallery Press endures as a landmark, continuing the arts of praise.

— Peter Fallon, 2004