The Extraordinary Publication History of Addison’s Cato: Editions, Issues, Piracies

The remarkable theatrical history of Joseph Addison’s 1713 tragedy Cato is well known, but the play is also an exceptional case in book history. This essay looks in detail at its two entirely distinct “first” editions. It resolves the relationship between these two editions and considers the quite different problems they raise for the bibliographer: the one of how we distinguish between edition and issue in a context of frenzied publication, standing type, and incremental resetting; the other, of how a manifestly substandard and suspicious edition came to carry the self-proclaimed hallmark of the play’s true publisher, Jacob Tonson. The early print history of Addison’s Cato, this essay shows, both puts pressure on the language of bibliography and also marks an important and revealing episode in a number of larger histories: those of the Tonson house, of book piracy and copyright protection, and of the bestseller. Appendices provide bibliographical descriptions of the 1713 Qα and Qβ editions, press variants of the earliest three issues of Qα, and uncorrected errors in Qβ.