Jonathan Swift lived several lives simultaneously. He aspired to comfortable class status and to positions of power both in church and state. He was a responsible student at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College. He was an avid lifelong reader, beginning with his time at Kilkenny and Trinity (11). He was a long-term friend and lover of Esther Johnson, and, for a brief period, a tortured lover of Esther Vanhomrigh. He was a poetic chronicler of upper middle-class life, a practical joker, and a warm friend to people from all social classes, who fought against those in power and cared not a whit about common people's rights. He valued the spiritual welfare of his congregations, both in the Irish countryside at Laracor, and in the city of Dublin. He was good evening company in both Dublin and London. He wrote three of the most brilliant works of all time: A Tale of a Tub, A Modest Proposal, and Gulliver's Travels. He dashed off masterpieces like An Argument against Abolishing Christianity and A Description of a Morning seemingly in a few days each. He was, arguably, the best ironist of all time and all countries.Swift also lived a full life as a publisher of books, pamphlets, and poems, sometimes openly admitting his authorship, often playing secretive games about authorship, to amuse himself, to enhance his reputation, or to stay out of prison. Valerie Rumbold, in Swift in Print, has skillfully and humanely, fully and carefully, written the story of Swift's publishing life, one of Swift's most important lives, a story that would make up a rich life in itself for many an accomplished person. Rumbold organizes her study with a compelling narrative, pulling together the many strands of Swift's not, for the most part, very well-planned life. She convincingly illustrates all Swift's conflicting values: he sometimes considered himself English, sometimes Irish; he was committed to the established church, while indubitably attracted by secular thinking; he enjoyed people of all sorts, while feeling frequent contempt or anger for people's selfishness, incompetence, or carelessness; he was proud and avid for status, but could not resist getting into fights against corruption among those with status; he took great pride in being recognized as an author, but he loved concealing his authorship.Building on the bibliographical work of many scholars, but primarily of James Woolley, Stephen Karian, David Woolley, Michael Treadwell, James McLaverty, and James May, Rumbold has examined nearly every edition of Swift's work published in his lifetime, and twenty years beyond, giving us, in the process, the “feel” not just of those books and pamphlets, but also of Swift's life as he lived it with his publishers, and of his various and often entertaining publication processes. Rumbold's experience as a distinguished scholar of Alexander Pope—she is also the editor of volume 2 of the Cambridge Edition of Swift's Works—gives her an advantage in being deeply familiar with the literary and publishing milieu that Swift worked in, yet she never gives the impression in Swift in Print that she would rather be working on Pope, and she treats the Swift-Pope disputes in this book with impressive evenhandedness.To my mind, the most useful of the many contributions that Rumbold makes is the way she brings to life the men, women, and families with whom Swift worked in order to usher his writings into the public world. Rumbold gathers findings of previous scholars and her own research into a carefully wrought narrative that details the genealogies of both Swift's London and his Dublin publishers and printers, recounts the significant role that many of the publishers’ wives played in Swift's publishing, and emphasizes the physical proximity between Swift's own dwellings and his publishers, both in London and in Dublin: frequently, he simply walked over and spent a half day sipping coffee with them. Only when he was across the Irish Sea or at Sir William Temple's country estate of Moor Park was he more than half-an-hour's walk away. Rumbold uses Swift's published works, their title-pages and typography, his surviving account books, his letters, and the letters of others, to create a rich account of Swift's respect for and confidential fellowship with his publishers and printers: the Benjamin Tookes (both father and son), the Benjamin Mottes (again father and son), John Barber, Edward Waters, John and Sarah Hyde, John and Sarah Harding, and George Faulkner, among others. She ties together research by earlier scholars: that John Harding had been Edward Waters's apprentice; that the Irish George Faulkner moved to London in the late 1720s to apprentice with the English William Boyer, who had in turn worked with the Motte and Tooke families; that Faulkner, famous for working with Swift later, first worked with Swift in helping to publish the collection Fraud Detected in 1725; and that both Sarah Harding and Sarah Hyde came from printers’ families and were thus well prepared to take over their husbands’ businesses when they died. Rumbold reminds us too of the telling family link between Swift and the couple John and Jane Brent. John Brent was Swift's first publisher (of his Ode to the King in 1691), and his wife Jane became Swift's housekeeper, working for him for more than forty years, until her death in 1735 when she was succeeded by her daughter, Ann Brent Ridgeway. It is a tribute to the characters of both Swift and his publishers and printers that Swift never dropped one of them, and that not one of them ever quit working for him, even when working with Swift often put their assets, their liberty, or even their lives in jeopardy. To a remarkable degree, considering that Swift's writings often endangered not only a publisher's living, but also his life, he believed in his publishers and printers, and they believed in him.Rumbold accurately describes the dramatic shift in Swift's publishing ambition over the course of his life: “In Swift's early years print figured principally as an opportunity for a clergyman and writer to position himself for preferment; later it served to provide maximum dissemination for confrontational polemic” (21). By focusing on Swift's life in the publishing world, Rumbold offers us a vivid account of his concerns between 1688 and 1708, a period we are rarely told much about because Swift's surviving letters from that period are few. Her portrait of Swift during these years is one of an industrious, not-very-well–placed clergyman trying to make at least a modest mark in the publishing world, at the same time overflowing with glee at his assiduously well-kept secret that he was the brilliant, mischievous author of A Tale of a Tub. From 1688 to 1708 Swift was writing; publishing a few works of Sir William Temple, which familiarized him with the London book trade (38); walking long distances (Moor Park to London and back, and even Chester to London and back, after crossing the Irish Sea by packet boat), to carry out his publishing aspirations; and living a playful, unconventional life with Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, first in England from 1688 to 1699, as Esther Johnson grew up, and then in Ireland from 1699 to 1708, once Esther Johnson had agreed to cast her lot with him, sharing an Irish household with Swift, her friend Dingley, and the aforementioned Jane Brent.Swift's first London publishing connections were with Sir William Temple's publishers, Jacob Tonson and Richard Simpson, but beginning with Swift's first major political pamphlet, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701), he formed his lifelong link with the Benjamin Tookes, first the father and later his son. The feel of Swift's life that Rumbold so effectively conveys is evident in her noting that twenty-two copies of the first edition of Contests and Dissensions survive, and forty of the second edition (51), suggesting that from the very beginning of Swift's political career, people were buying his writings, paying attention to his views, and wanting to save and to reconsult what he wrote. She reminds us that John Barber, who became Swift's printer for works of Tory polemic between 1710 and 1714 and one of Swift's closest friends during his prime, was recruited not by Swift but for Swift by the Harley-Bolingbroke ministry (104), and that Edward Waters, best known for being imprisoned in Ireland after publishing Swift's Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in 1720, started working with Swift as early as Swift's Conduct of the Allies in London in 1711 (137). Rumbold infers, after comparing the quality of the Waters and Hyde reprints of Swift's Conduct of the Allies, that Swift turned to Hyde during the 1720s to publish several pamphlets, even though Waters had suffered imprisonment for him, both because Hyde was a significantly more careful printer, and because Waters seemed reluctant to risk imprisonment again. Waters does not seem to have resented Swift's turning to a man whom Waters had often worked with himself.Rumbold details how Swift only gradually came to take himself seriously as a Writer with a capital W: “Swift's [early] publications, usually anonymous, relatively unpretentious in format, . . . did not constitute a livelihood in themselves, but were part of the professional career of a university-educated Church of Ireland clergyman” (xv). Unlike Pope's works, Swift's, until he published Gulliver's Travels at the age of fifty-eight, were “clustered towards the middle and lower reaches of the market” (xi). Only in Gulliver's Travels (1726) and in the Swift-Pope Miscellanies (1727–32) did Swift publish in handsome octavos. And only twenty years after he died, did Deane Swift, a cousin whom Swift did not have much respect for, and John Hawkesworth, who did not have much respect for Swift, produce an elegant quarto edition far from the “modest formats and expressive typography of its author's lifetime” (xix).Rumbold emphasizes several of Swift's distinctive personal qualities. He was impulsive, both in life and in publishing. His attempts to conceal his authorship were either deliberately or not-so-deliberately careless. Rumbold also emphasizes Swift's lifelong self-sabotage that resulted from his inability to withhold publication when he had come up with something he thought of as particularly clever. He could not resist adding the offensive Mechanical Operation of the Spirit to his exuberant Tale of a Tub and Battle of the Books. He excoriated Queen Anne's close confidante, the Duchess of Somerset, in his December 1711 Windsor Prophecy precisely when he assumed that Anne would soon be granting him a comfortable English church living. More personally tragic, he published Cadenus and Vanessa about his affair with Esther Vanhomrigh only months before Esther Johnson died, when he could have held onto it long enough so that the infidelity evident in his poem would not wound his closest friend on her deathbed.My only slight disagreement with Swift in Print is that Rumbold retains a few stereotypes of Swift that have too long been prevalent: for instance, that he was not writing from his conscience when he was asked to write propaganda (102–05), and that he was prone to “brusque reproof” (167) of his publishers. Swift supposedly berated Harding, in his second Drapier's letter, for not printing enough copies of the first Drapier's letter to meet initial demand. But this reproof contained no real criticism: it served primarily to let Harding and the world know both how important, and how risky, this publishing venture was. Rumbold also writes that Swift was “enraged” at Pope and Benjamin Motte Jr., when he wrote to them about the censorship and the editorial decisions they made about their joint Miscellanies project (xviii). But I think even here Swift was less “enraged” than he was frustrated and given to grumbling. Many of his surviving complaints about the way his books were published are taken from letters, where his querulous tone must be read as at least partly ironic since these letters as a whole show obvious respect for his correspondents, whether working class or gentry.Rumbold rarely comes to these conclusions overdramatizing Swift's attitudes on her own, but sometimes repeats them just because they have been with us for a long time. She assumes “Swift's notorious hostility to Dissenters” (16) and his “characteristic denigration of dissent” (83). But isn't Swift's portrayal of Jack in the Tale more a play of exuberant satire and humor, and a warning about the intellectual misdirection of Dissenters, than a reflection of “notorious hostility”? Rumbold writes also of “Swift's pugnacious defense of Anglican privilege” (11) in the Tale. But isn't that work more accurately described as “mischievous,” “hilarious,” and “an intellectual warning” than as “pugnacious”? Rumbold's own evidence nearly always leads her to more subtle and more accurate inferences, as, for example, when she writes, “There is, in Swift's writing about [Jane Brent, his Presbyterian housekeeper], a persistent coupling of ideological exasperation with abiding attachment” (17).Aside from these few nods to traditional assumptions about Swift, Rumbold impressively respects the variety in Swift's career, usually declining to apply summative labels. She resists applying Swift's “saeva indignatio” comment from his Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, as so many do, to his whole life. She more precisely notes that Swift's Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland “for the first time put before the public something of the ‘saeva indignatio’ for which Swift would later choose to be remembered” (87). And when she quotes George Faulkner's comments on Swift's Directions to Servants, she distinguishes Faulkner's assertion that “the Author's Design was to expose the Villanies and Frauds of Servants” (265–66) from Swift's clearly more ironic, humorous, and even subversive portraits of servants in that work.Rumbold's command of Latin and her deftness in translating it in an appropriate colloquial tone is exemplary and helpful throughout the book. She closely analyzes the printing of the many works she has examined, noting that Swift took pride in high-quality printing as an essential foundation for promoting his status as a preeminent author. Rumbold acknowledges with Carole Fabricant the heartache of Swift's “never entirely suppressed wish to be a writer speaking from the center of civilization rather than from its margins” (216). But time and again she depicts the more pragmatic, day-to-day Swift who was proud that “the letters ascribed to the Drapier became the shabby, nondescript little pamphlets that proved so crucial to the campaign against Wood's patent” (155). And she surmises that Swift was equally proud that “the undistinguished material form of A Modest Proposal has a rhetorical force of its own” (208). I thoroughly enjoyed reading Valerie Rumbold's Swift in Print. Every paragraph contains matter of interest, cogently and accurately presented.