Reminder: Christmas Drinks TONIGHT!

Just a quick reminder that our Christmas drinks are TONIGHT, from 5 pm in the Lord Edward Pub on Lord Edward Street, Dublin. We’re gathering to share a bit of festive cheer, meet and chat with our dedicated readers, and generally celebrate the holiday season. Hope to see you all there!

Come to our Christmas Drinks

Ok, we’ll admit that Christmas is still more than two-and-a-half weeks away, but for occasions like this you can’t be too careful in your planning (i.e. we made our decision, with no little enthusiasm, at our meeting in early November). On Friday 17 December, the editors of Pue’s Occurrences will be upstairs in the Lord Edward pub on Dublin’s Lord Edward street from 17.00 (5 p.m. for those of us without digital watches), and we’d love you to join us for a pre-Christmas drink. It’s our chance to thank you in person for reading, for commenting and contributing, to meet some of you for the first time, to see some of you again, but most of all just to have a bit of banter to ward off the biting wind/snow/frost/recession/IMF/EU/general political malaise (insert as mood takes you).

See you there!

If you don’t know us already, there’s a photographic reminder after the jump by way of introduction: 

The Pue in Pue’s Occurrences

Contributed by Turlough O’Riordan

I’m sure some of you, even the eighteenth-century experts among you and those who have read our ‘about’ page, will have asked the question at some stage: just who was this Pue character anyway? We asked Turlough O’Riordan of the Dictionary of Irish Biography to explain…

Richard Pue, the publisher of the noted eponymous eighteenth-century Dublin newsletter, founded ‘Dick’s Coffee House’ in Skinner Row in Dublin, sometime before July 1698. He was certainly active in book auctions by this time; John Dunton described him thus: “he is a witty and ingenious man, makes the best coffee in Dublin … and has a peculiar knack at bantering, and will make rhymes to any thing” [Dublin Scuffle (2000), 429]. Nothing is known for certain about his life before then.

Commencing publication of Impartial Occurences on 25 December 1703, in partnership with Edward Lloyd, Pue edited the newspaper, sometimes with Lloyd, for the next three years. It then went into abeyance before being re-titled as Pue’s Occurences (sic) in February 1712, by which time it was in Pue’s sole ownership.

Pue was as much a printer, publisher and editor as a coffee-house proprietor.