Edmund Curll at Work
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 04 June 2026
- 16 July 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009749015
- 9781009748988
- 9781009748964
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.5kg, 328 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.25kg, 328 Pages
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Book description
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.
Reviews
‘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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