SOURCE: Hammond. Paul. “The Printing of the Dryden-Tonson Miscellany Poems (1684) and Sylvae (1685).” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 84, no. 4 (Dec. 1990): 405-12.

In the following essay, Hammond reconstructs the process by which Dryden and Tonson's Miscellany Poems and Sylvae reached their final form.

The first two in the series of verse miscellanies published by Tonson with some editorial supervision by Dryden are important volumes in the publishing and cultural history of the Restoration. Miscellany Poems (1684) and Sylvae (1685)¹ were particularly influential in fostering a taste for verse translation from the classics. But a bibliographical examination of these two volumes suggests that the scope of the miscellanies was not determined until a surprisingly late stage in their compilation. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the process by which these two miscellanies reached their final form.

Miscellany Poems is an octavo, collating as [A]⁴ B-X⁸ Y⁴ A-C⁸ D...