In the late 1670s the Bristol ship Diligence made regular trips to north-west Ireland. It was only one of a small flotilla of ships from Bristol which forayed in the late seventeenth century to the apparently isolated ports of Killybegs and Sligo. These ships carried a range of goods essential to the survival of those who lived at the edge of Europe. The hold of the Diligence contained bottles, window glass, gunpowder, lead, leather, sugar, hops, drinking glasses and wool cards. Other ships bound for Sligo and Killybegs in the 1670s had molasses, oil seed, tobacco, madder, logwood, figs, tobacco pipes, bellows, shot and brass manufactures. The contents of the holds of these ships contained a wide range of materials, but the cargo which most had in common was books, ranging in quantity from 14 lb to a hundredweight. This brief glimpse of the trade of some of the remote parts of north-west Ireland is a reminder that in the late seventeenth century the inhabitants of even the more distant areas of Ireland found themselves drawn into a world in which the printed word was a commonplace. Fed initially by imports from Chester and Bristol, the demand for books by the end of the century was more frequently met by the output of a reinvigorated Dublin press. As contemporaries became more confident in handling this great outpouring of print, their attitudes to their world were increasingly moulded by it, and in turn they shaped the texts with which they came into contact by reading them in a variety of ways.