University of Virginia Library

N&Q, CLXXXVII, 276.

PQ, XXIV (1945), 143.

Copies with No. I in edition A.: BM, CSmH, ICN, ICU, MH, Professor Chauncey B. Tinker, Friedman. Two of these copies are a re-issue with an engraved title-page ("London. Printed for W: Lane," n.d.). Copies with No. I in edition B.: CSmH, CtY, MH (3 copies), Mr. Louis H. Silver. Two of these copies are Lane's re-issue. I am grateful to Mr. Carey S. Bliss, Mr. Herman Liebert, and Mr. William B. Todd for their reports on copies.

This is not quite Mr. Knight's argument: "We should expect such mistakes to be fewer in the later of the two issues, if there were a valid re-issuing of the work which would pay the publisher to make it more correct. But if he needed it for a limited purpose, and in a hurry, some compositor would have the responsibility of duplicating the earlier text." It is hard to see that haste would be involved here: three weeks elapsed between the appearance of the last weekly number on 24 November 1759 and the publication of the collected issue on 15 December; and it now appears that Wilkie must have had enough copies of the first edition of No. I, whether A. or B., to complete sets for which there was any prospect of an immediate sale.

Compositors, however, seem not to have felt free to change other marks to periods; at least I have almost never found this change in editions not revised by the author.

Other signs of a reprint in Goldsmith's day are the expansion of contractions such as "I'm," "don't," and "tho'" and the change of "'d" endings in prose to "ed."

I do not include in my figures here the two instances mentioned earlier where the punctuation is incorrect in A. and correct in B., for the only differences are in the position of the punctuation.

Studies in Bibliography, V (1952), 190-93.

The second gathering of No. II, which has only one press figure. The figure "1" on p. 116 is not present in all copies.