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At €2,500, the Robert Ballagh Monograph sounds like a very expensive book. For your money, though, you get a handmade, meticulously crafted, limited-edition work that includes 24 original gicleéprints – collector’s items in themselves. Artist and designer Paul Rattigan directed the design and production of the two-volume monograph. The project harnessed the talents of a number of specialist craftspeople, nearly all of them based in the Netherlands.

“We were disappointed that we just couldn’t get it done in Ireland,” Rattigan says, “but here those crafts are more or less gone.” He trained as a graphic artist – “it was called commercial art at the time” – and he points out that most of the people who taught contemporary graphics in Ireland were Dutch. “It’s very striking that in Holland there is a huge love of books.” In the midst of technological change they have retained the traditional skills of book production. And it’s not as if those involved in the monograph were representatives of a dying breed – they were often, he points out, young people learning and carrying on the skills.