Pre-Order to become one of 300 named subscribers to this very limited edition. Subscribers' names shall be listed at the end of this volume, in homage to the 1726 edition.
Travels into remote nations of the world by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, now universally known as Gulliver’s Travels, was published in London on the 28th of October 1726. This year marks the 300th anniversary of what became the most influential book ever written by an Irish author.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was an instant best-seller. Within weeks, at a speed impressive even in our interconnected world, the Travels spawned the first examples of the many thousands of abridgements, sequels, adaptations and translations that has continued to this day. Since 1726 Gulliver’s image has graced the pages of books comics, tv series, films, cartoons, plays and musicals, as well as book markers, postcards, playing cards, and other ephemera.
For much of the past three hundred years the Travels has been inappropriately presented as a children’s adventure story, which it is decidedly NOT. Rather it is a prescient, savage masterpiece of ironic satire on human pride and intellectual solipsism. A Tale of a Tub (1704), Swift’s first masterpiece, was ‘Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind’. Gulliver’s Travels, his second, aimed ‘to vex the world rather than divert it’. In exploding the insidious myth of the distinction between a human and animal species, it forms a warning to future generations. Gulliver’s Travels, in bestriding the world of literary culture, has had a profound influence ever since. George Orwell, for whom the Travels ‘meant more than any other book ever written’, concluded it was one of the six books he’d retain for the benefit of all humanity. W.B.Yeats famously noted, ‘Swift haunts me. He is always around the corner.’
The Lilliput Press was itself founded in honour of Jonathan Swift in 1984. Its commemorative edition celebrates this foundation stone of Anglo-Irish literature and marks the tricentenary of the first publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, bringing it home to Dublin, its place of origin. Swift was troubled by the numerous changes and errors that had crept into the first London edition, declaring ‘I do hardly know my own work.’ Lilliput reproduces the George Faulkner printing first published in Dublin in 1735, supported by an impressive list of subscribers, complete with Swift’s own corrections and amendments. It is introduced by general editor Brendan Twomey with a further essay by Declan Kiberd. Our special limited edition, printed in a royal octavo format, will be cloth-bound and boxed, accompanied by a signed, numbered print offered to subscribers by the artist P.J. Lynch.
