Edmund Curll at Work

Edmund Curll is traditionally considered a pornographer, remembered for having been condemned to gaol and the pillory. Here, Pat Rogers looks beyond this ignominious reputation to focus on the specifics of Curll's working methods as a publisher, his relations with the book trade, his sometimes anomalous position with regard to the milieu of Grub Street, his marketing strategies, and his repertoire of misleading bibliographic tricks. In doing so he throws new light on the factors underlying his quarrels with authors, who included Swift, Pope, and Defoe, alongside many others. Also revealed are Curll's previously unexplored dealings with the politics of the City of London, and his complex uses of anonymity. New biographic data and fuller bibliographical enquiries provide the basis for a more reliable documentation of the shape of his extraordinary, if questionable, activity within the context of the eighteenth-century print world.

• Locates Curll within the book trade of his era for the first time, eschewing sensationalism and adding nuance to our understanding of his unique place among purveyors of Grub Street literature
• Details the precise mechanisms that operated in the construction and marketing of Curll's works, delving into matters such as his manipulation of imprints and use of paratextual devices
• Supplies a more accurate and complete rendition of Curll's output, revising and supplementing older sources such as the catalogue of Ralph Straus and recontextualising Curll's disputes with Swift and Pope