A Beautiful Copy in Contemporary Full Polished Calf
Johnson’s Great Dictionary - PMM - First Edition - 1755
"The Most Amazing, Enduring, and Endearing One-Man Feat in the Field of Lexicography"
Johnson, Samuel. A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, in Which the Words are deduced from their Originals...To Which are Prefixed a History of the Language and An English Grammar (London: by W. Strahan, 1755) 2 volumes. First edition. Title pages printed in red & black, woodcut tailpieces. Royal folio, full contemporary sprinkled calf with a sympathetic antique restoration at the spine panel incorporating the original lettering labels. The covers with borders decorated with double gilt fillet lines, the spines with handsome raised bands gilt ruled, the contrasting dark red and green lettering labels are stamped in gilt. Very beautifully preserved. Internally especially clean and well preserved, and a large copy, unpressed and with fine margins. A bit of very light expected age or shelf rubbing at the extremities, but without question, an unusually fine, handsome and clean set.
RARE AND HIGHLY IMPORTANT, THE TRUE FIRST EDITION OF SAMUEL JOHNSON’S MASTERWORK AND A WONDERFUL CLEAN AND LARGE COPY. "The most amazing, enduring and endearing one-man feat in the field of lexicography (PMM). Begun in 1747 and printed over five years, Johnson's DICTIONARY set the standard for all subsequent lexicographical work. Its excellence was immediately recognized in all quarters and the first edition of two thousand copies sold quickly.
What set Johnson's DICTIONARY apart from earlier efforts was his reliance on the examples of English literature rather than his own intuition or previous word lists or dictionaries, a method that has been the standard ever since, from Richardson and Webster to the Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson, in undertaking this vast work, set out to perform single-handed for the English language what the French Academy, a century before, had attempted for French. He hope to produce "a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated;" and though, of course, no language can be frozen in time, by aiming at fixing the language he succeeded in giving the standard of reputable use. As Noah Webster stated, his work "had, in philology, the effect which Newton's discoveries had in mathematics."
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