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was rather cleverly insinuating a free rein for pirates, who on this account could purloin any work as long as they arranged for a complicit Irish reprinting first.) "In Ireland the booksellers without ceremony reprint upon the English," John Murray heard later still, "and the English have the priviledge in their turn to reprint upon the Irish." Between 1729 and 1767 the Bowyers reprinted in London about sixty books originating in Ireland, mainly from Faulkner. Usually this was by agreement, but many of the same practical and moral issues attended English reprinting as arose in Irish: the recruitment of trustworthy agents, problems of fake imprints, the knavery of journeymen, and so on. The prospect also gave crafty London operators like Murray leverage over Irish authors, because they could threaten a reprint should the authors refuse to come to terms.12 However, the London reprinting of Irish titles remained a relatively small-scale enterprise simply because Dublin was never the center for authorship that London was. Formal equivalence meant a substantial imbalance in practice. London, not Dublin, was the cultural and economic fountainhead of an empire.

This was the otherwise obscure context for the best-known instance of Irish "piracy" of them all. In 1753 Samuel Richardson denounced Faulkner for an "invasion of his property" in reprinting his massive novel Sir Charles Grandison. He told the story himself. With previous novels, Richardson reported, he had sent sheets to Ireland in advance of publication in London, so both securing a return from an Irishversion and forestalling an unauthorized one. He had adopted the same strategy with Grandison. After the huge success of Clarissa, however, his new novel was sure to be hunted down by Dublin's reprinters, whose ability to bribe journeymen into sending sheets was notorious. So this Englishman's printing house would become his castle. In fact, Richardson arranged for printing to be done at three separate premises, none ofwhichwould be given acomplete set of sheets. He made sure to employ only "Persons of experienced Honesty." No "Stranger" would be admitted. Every sheet of paper in the build- ingwould be accounted for. Workers must not breathe aword during their inevitable sessions at the tavern. He secured from them a declarationalmost an oath-against "Treachery," and handed out printed copies to remind them of their commitment. The sheets themselves were to be taken as they were printed off and deposited in a separate, secure warehouse. The task of taking them there he entrusted to one man only, a proofreader and warehouse keeper named Peter Bishop whom Richardson trusted implicitly. For his part, Bishop reassured him of "the Safety of the Work from Pirates."

These measures in place, Richardson sent twelve sheets to Faulkner as soon as they were ready. What he received back shocked him. Faulkner was abandoning their alliance to join with a group of "pirates." Three Dublin printers -Henry Saunders, John Exshaw, and Peter Wilson -were already hard at work on the novel, with far more of the text than Faulkner himself possessed. These "honest Men," as Richardson dubbed them, had "stuck up" title pages to claim the work, and were even implying ("Vile Artifice!") that their version was authorized. Worse still, Faulkner now told Richardson that he had handed over his own sheets, which contained last-minute notations by Richardson himself that were not in his own edition. The confederates could therefore advertise their version as preferable to his. `And who can say," Richardson wailed, that "if they can get it out before him, they will not advertise, that his is a Piracy upon theirs?"

Richardson now engaged a new Dublin agent, Robert Main, and sent him 750 copies from his own impression of the only volume of the novel that the pirates did not have. It did no good. The Dubliners, determined to "possess themselves of his whole Property," rushed out a "piratical Edition" and captured the market. Main ended up bankrupt. Meanwhile, at home Richardson first dismissed Bishop, only