The preface to a mid-seventeenth century edition of Verbum Sempiternum declares that “though the Volume and the Work be smal, / Yet it containes the sum of All in All.” A miniaturized devotional work, it uses its size to frame a tension between human and divine scale, and in doing so, it demonstrates the way in which all kinds of miniature texts of the eighteenth century played with the idea of a large subject in small form. This chapter uses examples of a series of miniature books published across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore questions of materiality, utility, scale, and legibility. Miniature books worked on the premise of totality made accessible through compression. We might see them as a kind of epistemological comfort blanket, the promise of a world of knowledge and information that their readers could own, wear, display. And in the virtuosity of their execution, their acts of precision engraving, typesetting, and binding, they offered fine examples of human ingenuity. But at the same time, in reducing the most important documents of Western faith and civilization into compact form, they also raised questions about their own credibility.

For as long as he was able, Swift continued to send important poems to press in London, while Polite Conversation was published in strategically different editions there and in Dublin. Directions to Servants, finally sent to press unfinished, was brought out by Faulkner a few days after Swift’s death in 1745. But Faulkner soon lost ground to the London copy-holders, whose new 1755 edition, first advertised as to be edited by ‘an intimate Friend of the Author’, was in the event edited by a professional man of letters, John Hawkesworth, and boasted the novelty of a fashionable large quarto. The first publication of The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen in 1758 showed that even an editor who had known Swift personally could still denounce his politics. In 1765 Swift’s cousin Deane Swift added to Hawkesworth’s edition new material from family manuscripts. The volumes‘ imposing quarto option, and its clean modern pages, confirm just how much Swift in print had changed from the modest formats and expressive typography of its author’s lifetime.

The Works of J. S, D. D, D. S. P. D., whose first four volumes were published by George Faulkner in Dublin under the date of 1735, was a landmark achievement for the Dublin trade and for Swift in print. These are volumes of considerable expressive force, owing in part to their generous use of frontispieces, ornaments and paratexts. This was the nearest thing to an authorised collected edition to appear in Swift’s lifetime. Although it is rightly regarded as a monument, and a significant step in the consolidation of Swift in print, it is clear from the proposal and the 1735 tranche of volumes that it was a radically – and expressively – compromised one.

Swift’s paratexts to his posthumous editions of the works of his patron, Sir William Temple, first presented his words in high-quality print. Having chosen Benjamin Tooke the younger as his bookseller, Swift went on to publish A Tale of a Tub in 1704 – a notorious and expensive production, which, considered as a book, turns out, despite its modern reputation, to be surprisingly normal.

London publication still held apparent advantages that Dublin could not reliably offer (legally secured copyrights, high-quality printwork, effective distribution and assistance from the established contacts of Swift’s London years). After the Drapier affair, there was a brief period when the Dublin-based Swift once more centred his publications in London, arguably to the benefit of Swift in print, though not in the end to the satisfaction of Swift himself. Now that Tooke was dead, Swift sold the copy of his Travels to his successor, Benjamin Motte the younger, and provided Pope with material for a joint set of London Miscellanies. Later, enraged by the selection and censorship they had exercised, Swift responded by conniving at the appearance of authorial revisions in Dublin reprints – even while entrusting Irish friends with more poems to carry to press in London.

The print worlds of of Dublin and London, in and between which Swift in print was formed, were sharply differentiated by regulation and custom. Swift’s first two printed works, one printed in each, were revealingly odd: An Ode. To the King was published by John Brent in Dublin, and Ode to the Athenian Society was published by John Dunton in London. Dunton’s The Dublin Scuffle (his account of a working visit undertaken in 1698), shows how some of the print-trade structures and individuals of Swift’s early formation (and their children, apprentices and associates) would continue to influence the long-term development of Swift in print.

During the hectic period of Swift’s service to the Tory ministry from 1710 to 1714, print not only disseminated his day-to-day political interventions, which were published by the ministry’s official printer, John Barber, but also supported claims for longer-term significance. In 1711 Benjamin Tooke published the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse that first brought together the beginnings of a Swift canon; and in the following year he produced, to particularly expressive effect, Swift’s doomed Proposal to found an academy, fix the language, and celebrate the Queen and her ministers to posterity.

The years up to 1710 were intensely productive for Swift in print. The Bickerstaff affair demonstrated the power of print to consolidate and further develop the techniques of anonymity on which it had relied to date, reaching a climax in the Bickerstaff hoax of 1708–9, and presenting in 1710 the elaborated but still technically anonymous fifth edition of the Tale.

After the long silence that followed Swift’s return to Ireland in 1714 when the ministry fell and the Queen died, Swift in print achieved a new degree of public engagement, ultimately exploding with unprecedented force in the Drapier’s letters against Wood’s halfpence, a series of shabby but effective pamphlets which staged print and its processes in notably self-referential terms, representing print as a means of bringing people together for the common good. By the triumphant end of the campaign Swift in print was a dynamic brand in a growing Dublin print trade.