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.
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'Edmund Curll was one of the most significant, remarkable and notorious figures in the literary world of the early eighteenth century. Pat Rogers has given us a much-needed and ground-breaking study, deeply scholarly yet compellingly readable, of Curll's strategies, operations, and entanglements as publisher and bookseller.' Marcus Walsh, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool 'The 'unspeakable' Curll is routinely reduced to a cliché in accounts of the eighteenth-century book trade; it is remarkable that no one has written this history until now. Pat Rogers exposes the real Curll, cutting through centuries of anecdote to reveal the tools, strategies, and sharp marketing decisions behind a list that ranged from sermons to scandal.' Allison Muri, Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan and Director of the Grub Street Project
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A bold reappraisal of Edmund Curll's career, shifting emphasis from his public ignominies to his working habits as a publisher.
Introduction: a survey of Curll's publishing career; Part I. A Life in
Bookselling:
1. Curll and the book trade;
2. Edmund Curll, citizen and
liveryman;
3. Curll and grub street; Part II. The Craft of a Publisher:
4.
Curll's imprints: tools of the trade;
5. The attribution of books to
publishers: Curll and the memoirs of John Macky; Part III. Genre Studies:
6.
Paratext in eighteenth-century biography: Curll on the job;
7. The uses of
the miscellany: swift, Curll, and piracy; Part IV. The Tug of War:
8.
Nameless names: Pope, Curll, and the strategies of anonymity;
9. Men at arms:
Dennis, Pope, and Curll;
10. Ben Jonson's Crispinus, Pope, and the poisoning
of Curll (with Paul Baines); Afterword; Appendix
1. The conduct of the earl
of Nottingham: Curll, Pope, Oldmixon and the Finch family; Appendix
2. A
projected Catalogue of Curll's publications; Select bibliography; Index of
publications by Curll; General index.
Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, formerly Eminent Scholar, and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Edmund Curll, Bookseller, with Paul Baines (2007); and The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope versus Edmund Curll (2021), along with many studies in book history and bibliography.
