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17 results

Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard, James McLaverty
  • Published online:
    05 June 2013
    Print publication:
    18 July 2013
  • Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and innovation in the evolution of the book. His publications, perhaps more than those of any other single author, illustrate the range of developments that transformed print culture during the early Enlightenment. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. The shifting moods of irony, complicity and indignation that characterise his dealings with the book trade add a layer of complexity to the bibliographic record of his published works. The essays collected here offer the first comprehensive, integrated survey of that record. They shed new light on the politics of the eighteenth-century book trade, on Swift's innovations as a maker of books, on the habits and opinions revealed by his commentary on printed texts and on the re-shaping of the Swiftian book after his death.

  • 14 - Pope and the book trade

  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
    Published online:
    28 April 2008
    Print publication:
    06 December 2007, pp 186-197

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Pope's absorption in the book trade is remarkable. Always fascinated by typography, he was commenting on trade practices and condemning some of them by the time he was thirty. But paradoxically the tricks he observed, particularly author and bookseller anonymity, serialization, reissues, and manipulation of formats, all fed positively into the second half of his career, in which he was, in the modern sense, his own publisher, financing and designing his own books, and supervising their distribution. Pope made a lot of money from the publication of his own work - around £10,000.00 from his translations of Homer alone - but he also made the book trade his subject and its resources a means of self-expression. In ways that are characteristic of him, he seems at times the most unequivocal of insiders, with a detailed knowledge of contracting, designing, advertising, and distribution, while at other times, he is merely the bibliographer or book historian, wryly recording curious practices and displaying them for our disapproval. Complex social pressures lie behind these stances - a growing public sphere in which reputations were to be earned and maintained, the possibilities of large financial rewards for writing, the slow replacement of patronage by the market - and Pope undoubtedly regarded his own times and their changes as hostile to his success. Ironically, this very awareness became integral to his achievement.