[Rarebooks] Johnson's Dictionary, 4th folio edition

[Edward Ripley-Duggan]

We offer the following at a significant discount from our retail price, for 
a limited time. The price is nett to all.

(DICTIONARY). Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language: in 
which the words are derived from their originals... to which are prefixed a 
history of the Language and an English Grammar. London, Strahan, Rivington, 
&c, 1773. Fourth (and definitive) edition. Two volumes, 43 cm. (a tall 
copy), recently rebound (hollow-backed for easy of handling) in full Hewitt 
sprinkled calf, covers with a single blind rules, spines with raised bands 
in seven compartments, label in dark maroon, all edges speckled (from the 
original binding -- this was not trimmed on rebinding). Both volumes with 
title pages printed in red and black. The advertisement leaf is bound 
between A1 and A2, instead of after C2, otherwise the preliminary matter 
collates as per Fleeman, with the hanging catchword on the singleton D1 as 
usual. There is a tear with loss to the bottom of the gutter margin of 3Y2, 
just touching three or four words. Internally, despite a few pale stains 
affecting a few signatures (and one small stain, somewhat darker, affecting 
some thirty leaves in vol. I), and some very occasional pale foxing, this 
is a rather fresh, clean copy in a very attractive and apposite binding. It 
has been fully collated. This edition contains a large number of textual 
corrections and additions by Johnson, and while he may have intended 
further changes in the fifth edition, these exist only in manuscript. From 
a purely textual aspect, this has become the preferred edition among 
scholars. The many added quotations reflect Johnson's reading in the years 
between the first publication of the Dictionary and this: there is much of 
Milton. Allen Reddick states: "Many of the new sources from which he 
borrowed were theological writers, and the cumulative effect of the new 
quotations and their accompanying definitions or notes on usage is to draw 
attention to a broader theological sense of the word in question..." 
Johnson himself said "Many faults I have corrected, some superfluities I 
have taken away, and some deficiencies I have supplied. I have methodised 
some parts that were disordered, and illuminated some that were obscure." 
Strahan, the printer, drew up accounts for 1,250 copies. Fleeman 55.4D/4a, 
pp. 425-9; Courtney & Nichol Smith, p. 55; Chapman & Hazen, p. 138; Alston, 
V, 180

$3000 nett
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