Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
with the Complete Illustrations of J.J. Grandville

A beautiful edition of Gulliver's Travels with all of the more than 400 illustrations drawn by J.J. Grandville, the most vivid and complete set of illustrations ever made to accompany Swift's masterpiece. Commissioned for a French translation in 1838, these etchings have never before been printed with Swift's original text. The hundreds of detailed pictures have all been set within the very text they illustrate, providing a continuously entertaining counterpoint.


"A masterpiece of bookmaking — all the elements are combined with a degree of care and skill rare in publishing today. It's the kind of enchanting book I remember from childhood, each page delightfully designed to combine the text and illustrations, the kind of beautifully made book you almost never see any more."

— Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post

"The kind of book that would normally be issued at an outrageous price. It has the text that Swift himself revised and approved. It has illustrations by J.J. Grandville that complement the text to perfection. It is good to look at, it is good to hold, and it is built to last for ever. It would be hard to find a more desirable edtion of a classic contribution to English literature."

— John Russell, The New York Times

The text of this edition is that of the 1735 edition published in Jonathan Swift's native Dublin with his approval and including his revisions of the first edition of 1726. It retains Swift's original spelling and punctuation.

Grandville's illustrations were first published in 1838 when he was thirty-five (he was to die only nine years later), and already had a considerable reputation as a political cartoonist. Like his younger colleague Honoré Daumier he had contributed to the leading French journals of political caricature, occasionally running afoul of the government censors. His illustrated books, outstanding in a period of great book illustration in France, won him wide popularity and success. He evidently found Gulliver's Travels particularly congenial as a subject for illustration. He himself had a keen and fierce eye for politics, a wry amusement at the pretensions of science, a fascination with metamorphoses and subversions of perspective and scale, and a sympathetic recognition of the absurdities of human behavior. His illustrations are drawn with a charcteristic love of detail and a scrupulous adherence to Swift's text.

Hardcover 6 x 9

544 pages

Illustrated with 445 drawings

ISBN 0-915556-29-4

LC 80-22845 CIP

US$ 37.50
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