Swift in Print

The journal's unique selling point was its promise to answer readers' questions: focusing on what Berry identifies as 'the concerns of the middling sort' of both sexes, it was ideally pitched for popular consumption. Among other printers, Richard Baldwin (c. 1653-1698), a voluminous trade publisher and printer of popular Whig polemic, was heavily involved. The flimsy half-sheet was printed on both sides, with advertisements at the end; the questions and answers were crammed into double columns of patchily impressed small type; literal errors and mis-sorted and reversed letters were frequent; and the advertisements rarely strayed far beyond Dunton's own projects. One hallmark, typical of the lower end of the market, was last-minute switching to smaller type as space ran out, revealing a failure of the process by which, in Gaskell's words, 'the compositor - or sometimes the master or overseer - cast off" the copy by counting words and by computation according to the sizes of type and page that had been decided on'"--