Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784). A Dictionary of the English Language in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. London: W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755.

2 volumes, large folio (419 x 254 mm). Titles in red and black, woodcut tail-pieces. (Intermittent marginal toning or spotting.) Contemporary reverse calf (rebacked to style, preserving lettering-pieces and endpapers); folding cases. Provenance: armorial bookplate (Moncreiffe?).

"THE MOST AMAZING, ENDURING AND ENDEARING ONE-MAN FEAT IN THE FIELD OF LEXICOGRAPHY" (PMM)

FIRST EDITION OF JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY, one of the most influential books in the history of the English language and "a monument of industry and talent [and] the unrivaled authority for the English language" (Courtney and Smith p.54). Johnson's achievement in compiling his great Dictionary was immediately recognized. Adam Smith commended it in one of its earliest reviews, and Boswell called it a work of "superior excellence." Not only did Johnson give lucid definitions and codify spelling, but he also offered over 114,000 illustrative quotations, providing a compendium of excerpts from canonical works of English literature, meaning that even today it "may still be consulted for instruction as well as pleasure" (PMM). Noah Webster claimed that it was to language what Newton's discoveries were to mathematics. The present copy has Todd’s variant “a” settings of 19D (press figures 1v–9 and 2v–7) and 24O (press figure 1v–2), both in the first state, which Todd notes as highly uncommon. Of 13 copies examined by Todd, only one had both settings; 19D, which 'occurs very infrequently' in the first setting, has 58 textual variants in the second. Fleeman I, p. 410; Grolier English 50; PMM 201; Rothschild 1237; Todd, "Variants in Johnson's Dictionary 1755," The Book Collector, XIV (1965), pp. 212-214.

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