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Herbert Davis (Prose Writings, vol. xii, p. 337) was unable to discover any publication of this advertisement before it appeared in John Nichols’s edition of Swift’s work. The capitalization of the text is strikingly modernized (‘dean’, for example, is not given an initial capital) and the punctuation is likely to have been modernized as well.
Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was one of the most important booksellers operating in the second half of the eighteenth century. He became the leading publisher for protestant dissent and included among his authors William Cowper, John Newton, Joseph Priestly, Horne Took, Maria Edgeworth, and Erasmus Darwin.
John Nichols (1745-1826) was a distinguished printer, antiquarian, and editor. He was apprenticed to William Bowyer, Jr., on 6 February 1759, and Bowyer encouraged his literary interests and took him into partnership in 1766. Nichols’s work on Swift began with his Supplements to the Works in 1775, 1776, and 1779, and developed into full-scale editing. Nichols was also distinguished for antiquarian projects, including a type facsimile of the Domesday Book and a history of Leicestershire.
The Baldwins were an eminent firm of printers, printing among other things Read’s Weekly Journal and the Daily Chronicle.
References: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. xii, pp. 141, 337; A Dictionary of the Printer
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and Booksellers . . . 1726 to 1775, ed. H. R. Plomer, G. H. Bushell, E. R. McC. Dix (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1932).