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By Root 2110 0

what they saw as a settled English conspiracy to threaten their very existence. They suspected him of having earlier tried to undermine them en masse by importing London-printed copies of Pamela - a bid that had been stymied onlywhen Faulkner issued a clandestine version. The Grandison affair was to Faulkner and his counterparts only the latest of a series of collective efforts to subordinate Dublin's book trade to London's. Faulkner reinforced this impression by casting Main too as an interloper. The Dublin Spy called him a "Scotch pedlar, flying in the face of the government, the Parliament, and the Dublin Society." He was trying to "live independently of Irish stationers," and his importing of English editions was calculated to damage trade and country. Main does indeed seem to have been of Scots origin, and had no guild credentials; he had arrived in Dublin only in 1749. But the broader point is that Richardson's complaint should not necessarily be taken at face value. It was not unknown for a London operator to contract with an Irish counterpart in this way, preventing an unauthorized reprint, only to prevaricate, accuse the ally of piracy, and use that as a pretext to ship over enough copies to flood the Irish market.13

Dublin reprinting was not always -nor even usually- clandestine. But it did often have a rather informal quality. For the most part it rested on deals reached between booksellers, printers, and their representatives that were struck in person, over dinner, at the tavern, or in the coffeehouse, and sealed with a handshake. Large-scale projects might necessitate ad hoc partnerships, as with Grandison, only for those alliances too to be evanescent in the constantly shifting context of Dublin life. This, more than calculated skullduggery, is why the processes of reprinting have remained obscure. In general terms, though, it seems that major booksellers and printers would often maintain contacts with their London counterparts, and sometimes employ agents there. They were often willing to pay, not for copyrights, but for sheets to be sent to them from the printing house in advance of publication, so that they could be first to reprint the work in Ireland. This could be a distinctly secretive business: when John Millar found his Observations concerning the distinction of ranks in society being reprinted in Ireland, his London publisher feigned outrage even though he had himself furnished the sheets for the reprint. It was this ability to get prepublication sheets that gave Dublin reprinting its sometimes startling speed. A Dublin edition might appear less than a week later than its London archetype - or even, as Richardson warned, before the London impression had been published at all. Occasionally telltale evidence from books themselves gives a sense of this speed, as when poet Edward Young changed the title of one of his plays at the last minute and the Irish reprinters could not catch it in time. And it even seems that some Londoners would take the opportunity to play a double game, as in the case to be described in a moment.14

Impression sizes for Irish reprints were similar to those for London publications. That is, they ranged from 750 to two thousand, and occasionally higher for a sure seller. The books were usuallyverbatim reproductions of their originals-and occasionally more than verbatim. Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, for example, was reprinted "Page for Page with the English Edition, and upon the same Letter," the salient difference being that the reprint was 30 percent cheaper. Sometimes, however, material might be added, omitted, or altered. Faulkner found one unauthorized reprint of Swift's works omitting Gullivers Travels and the Drapier Letters. William Guthrie's Modern Geography was altered to expand the treatment of Ireland (later the Dublin emigre Mathew Carey would add American material too that helped make this one of the most popular books in that country). In the context of a duel between two Dublin theaters in 176o-6i, James Hoey craftily substituted the name of Barry for his bitter