A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind. To which is added, an Account of a Battel between the Antient and Modern books in St. James’s library. The Fourth Edition corrected.

Bound in contemporary panelled calf, gilt decorated spine, with five raised bands. Joints cracked at head & foot, some wear. Internally some dust-soiling, spotting and marginal fraying, without free endpapers, ink marks to pastedowns. Leaf C8 trimmed to removed ink writing, without loss of text.

“The fourth edition (1705) reimposes type shared with the third edition on at least 61 pages: B4v, B8v, E1v, E2v-E3, E7v, H1, H2-H3, H4v-H7, H8-H8v, K1-K2, K3v-4, K5v-K8v, N1, N2-O1, O2-O3, O4v-O5, O7-O8v, X1, X2v, X3v-X4, X5, X6. . . . The fourth edition introduces at least 29 alterations, five substantive, in shared text-settings, such as ’Complement’ for ’Compliment’ at H2/99.24 and ’some’ for the erroneous ’same’ at N5v/186.18.” Nineteen of those 29 variants, “most of which are corrections, occur in 46 page-settings that the fourth edition shares with both the second and third editions.” –p.96-97, May, James E. “Re-Impressed Type in the First Four Octavo Editions of A Tale of a Tub, 1704-1705.” In “The First Wit of the Age : essays on Swift and his contemporaries in honour of Hermann J. Real”, edited by Kirsten Juhas, Patrick Müller, and Mascha Hansen, 85-108. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013.