# Is "Gulliver's Travels (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World)" by Jonathan Swift a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Gulliver's Travels (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World) by Jonathan Swift (Benjamin Motte, London, 1726) is identified by: London: printed for Benj. Two editions are collected and both should be named.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- London: printed for Benj
- Motte, 1726; four parts bound in two volumes, octavo, with an engraved portrait frontispiece of Gulliver (by Sheppard after Sturt) and six engraved plates — five maps and one plate of the writing machine
- CENSUS CORRECTION: the batch note claims "Teerink AA first state." That is wrong
- Three issues appeared in 1726 — Teerink 289 "A" (published 28 October 1726, sold out within about a week), Teerink 290 "AA" (mid-November), and Teerink "B" (December)
- Teerink A is the first issue
- The points for A (all readings UNCORRECTED / earliest): Part I, p
- Publisher imprint reads Benjamin Motte, London

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Jonathan Swift |
| Publisher | Benjamin Motte, London |
| Year | 1726 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | London: printed for Benj |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
London: printed for Benj. Motte, 1726; four parts bound in two volumes, octavo, with an engraved portrait frontispiece of Gulliver (by Sheppard after Sturt) and six engraved plates — five maps and one plate of the writing machine. CENSUS CORRECTION: the batch note claims "Teerink AA first state." That is wrong. Three issues appeared in 1726 — Teerink 289 "A" (published 28 October 1726, sold out within about a week), Teerink 290 "AA" (mid-November), and Teerink "B" (December). Teerink A is the first issue. The points for A (all readings UNCORRECTED / earliest): Part I, p. 35, line 5 reads "Subsidies" (reset to "subsidues" in AA); Part III, p. 74 is MISNUMBERED "44" (correctly numbered in AA); Part IV, p. 52, line 1 reads "buth" for "but" (corrected to "but his" in AA); Part II, sig. G6 is a cancel with "Part III" at the foot. Hubbard's independent collation orders the same three by preliminaries and portrait: the first has xvi preliminary pages in Vol. I and the portrait in the FIRST state (name in a tablet below the medallion); the second (= AA) has xii preliminaries and the "Subsidues" error; the third (= B) is continuously paged and has "Vol. II" on the second volume's title-page. Beware the second state of the portrait (vertical chain-lines, inscribed "Captain Lemuel Gulliver of Redriff. Ætat. suæ LVIII") — it is normal in AA. Mixed sets are the rule, not the exception: auction records describe sets conforming to B throughout but with a single AA title, so collate every part. No dust jacket exists for a 1726 octavo. References: Teerink-Scouten 289 (A) and 290 (AA); ESTC T139451; Rothschild 2104; Hubbard, Contributions Towards a Bibliography of Gulliver's Travels.

## Is this the true first?
Two editions are collected and both should be named. (1) The Motte London 1726 first (Teerink A) is the first edition and first appearance in print — the census is right about publisher, city and year, wrong about which issue is first (A, not AA). (2) The Faulkner Dublin 1735 Works, Volume III, is the FIRST EDITION OF SWIFT'S OWN CORRECTED TEXT and is separately and seriously collected — Motte had cut and softened passages he judged politically dangerous, and Faulkner, working from an annotated copy supplied by "a friend of the author" (generally identified as Charles Ford), restored over 500 corrections and more than 50 passages absent from or expanded beyond Motte. The 1735 volume prints the "Letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson" complaining of Motte's alterations ("I do hardly know mine own work"). Many textual scholars treat the 1735 Faulkner as the editio princeps of the text; bibliographically the 1726 Motte remains the first edition of the book. Collect Motte for priority, Faulkner for the text — never let a 1735 Faulkner be sold or catalogued as "the first edition" without that distinction, and never let a Motte be called textually authoritative.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club edition exists for a 1726 imprint. Documented reprint tells: (1) any Dublin 1726/1727 or Motte 1727 "second/third edition" title-page statement rules out the first issue; (2) the overwhelming majority of donated Gullivers are 19th- and 20th-century illustrated children's abridgments (Rackham, Robinson, Dulac and successors) — these are "first thus" at best; (3) Limited Editions Club / Heritage Press and Folio Society issues carry a modern colophon or slipcase and are printed on modern paper; (4) Everyman's Library and school-text editions are cloth-bound with 19th/20th-century imprints on the title-page verso. A genuine Motte 1726 has no copyright page at all — identification runs through the title-page imprint, the portrait state, and the four text points above.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Gulliver's Travels (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World)* by Jonathan Swift a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/gullivers-travels-travels-into-several-remote-nations-of-the
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.