A Tale of a Tub. This item is unavailable.A Tale of a Tub

First printing, with the uncorrected text and the blank space on p. 320 where "uterinus" was later inserted (a second and third edition followed the same year). 19th-century full straight-grain morocco, ruled and lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. A near fine copy, clean, sound, and complete with the Treatises leaf at the front and the final blank. Not a scarce book generally, but distinctly so in this condition. 8vo (195 x 122mm), pp. [12], 322. Ref: Teerink-Scouten 217; Rothschild 1992. Swift's first major book is a satire on religious and scholarly excess, staged through the quarrels of three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, standing respectively for Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinist dissent, whose feud over their father's coat becomes an allegory for the fracturing of Christianity itself. Published anonymously, and so cleverly layered with digressions, mock-scholarly apparatus, and satire turned as often on the reader as on its ostensible targets, that even contemporaries debated its meaning and intent, the book scandalized enough of its early readers that Swift's own hopes for Church preferment are said to have suffered for it.…