Books

First edition. Two volumes, quarto (295mm x 225mm). Original publisher's blue-grey paper boards, manuscript titles to spine. Uncut. First issue, with "give" on page 135 of the first volume. All seven cancels present as usual, though lacking the preliminary blank in the second volume. A fine copy of a work rarely encountered in an original state. The boards are worn at the corners, with some soiling to the covers and minor repairs to the joints. Internally the pages are unpressed and uncut. There is a repaired closed tear to the margin of the frontispiece, very minor marginal worming from Mm-Ccc. Housed in custom made fleece-lined chemise and cloth slipcase. Engraved frontispiece of the subject to volume I, engraved 'Round Robin' plate and facsimile of Johnson's handwriting to rear of volume II. The Life Of Johnson was published on 16th May 1791 priced at two guineas and issued in the blue-grey boards of the present copy. Though the first edition comprised 1,750 sets of sheets, copies in the original boards are uncommon and usually feature far more repair than in the present example. The work was an immediate commercial success, and paved the way for modern biography. Even Thomas Macaulay, who published a now infamous review of a new edition of Boswell's Life Of Johnson in 1831 that did little for either Boswell's or Johnson's nineteenth-century reputation, was forced to admit that "The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them." Pottle 79, Rothschild 463, Grolier English Literature.

James Boswell's 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' is regarded as one of the greatest biographies written in the English language. It provides an in-depth and vivid recounting of the life of Samuel Johnson, a writer and critic who was a towering figure in 18th-century British literature.