OT: Dr. Johnson

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OT: Dr. Johnson

1L.Bloom
jul 22, 2022, 4:02 pm

After reading Boswell's account of his journey to the Hebrides with the good doctor, I'd like to read some of his own work. Can anyone recommend a book that contains some of Dr. J's writing?

2Willoyd
jul 22, 2022, 5:08 pm

How about Dr J's own account of the trip? There is an FS edition Alternatively there is an interesting paperback edition with the two men's accounts presented in parallel, edited by Ronald Black.

3abysswalker
jul 22, 2022, 5:33 pm

>1 L.Bloom: I recall reading something by Harold Bloom on Johnson, and many or most of the citations were to pieces in various periodicals such as The Rambler.

I would also be interested in recommendations for something like a "greatest hits" of his essays. FS does have a selection of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, but I think I would be interested in a deeper cut.

4InVitrio
jul 22, 2022, 6:48 pm

>1 L.Bloom: Can anyone recommend a book that contains some of Dr. J's writing?
The Dictionary?

Albeit Dictionary 2: The Return of the Killer Dictionary seems to have been lost.

5terebinth
Bewerkt: jul 22, 2022, 7:05 pm

Rupert Hart-Davis' Reynard Library series includes a generous (960 pages) selection of Johnson which may be of interest: first published 1950, reprinted 1957 and 1963. This eBay listing includes photos of the two contents pages, giving a good idea of the scope of the book:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/233790809701

A few copies are currently available on each side of the Atlantic. The series is a good one, rather resembling the earlier Nonesuch single-volume author selections, in a slightly larger format.

6ubiquitousuk
jul 23, 2022, 4:23 am

There's

The new London letter writer: Containing the compleat art of corresponding with ease, elegance, and perspicuity as is now practised by all persons of respectability.

There's a Golden Cockerel Press edition if you wanted it fine press.

7Betelgeuse
jul 23, 2022, 9:29 am

Folio Society published Samuel Johnson's "Rasselas" in 1975. I have a copy but I have not yet read it. It was originally published in 1795 under the full title, "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." I also have "Lives of the English Poets" by Samuel Johnson, published by Folio Society in 1965. My edition of the latter has a curious feature: between pp.128-129 there are two different photo insets of portraits purporting to be the metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley, though one of them is clearly the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare. As someone told me, "The mistake is noted in Folio 60. Apparently a correction was issued, but some of the mistaken versions survive." So I must have one of the surviving mistaken editions.

8coynedj
jul 23, 2022, 9:39 am

I read Rasselas, and while I found it good I didn't find it great. I don't recall specifics, it being quite some time since I read it. But I do recall that it wasn't anything I felt worth a re-read. His letters might be more entertaining - I've also read Boswell and found the discourse of the time very interesting.

9folio_books
jul 23, 2022, 10:16 am

>8 coynedj: I read Rasselas, and while I found it good I didn't find it great.

I didn't even find it good!

10cpg
Bewerkt: aug 5, 2022, 8:40 pm

Samuel Johnson: Selected Works was released by Yale University Press last year. They can be usually be counted on to make their books look nice.

Update: See #13 below!

11terebinth
aug 1, 2022, 3:00 pm

Once I'd confirmed that Dr. Johnson was accorded a Reynard Library volume, the unusual form of enabling prompted me to find myself a copy. Mona Wilson's introduction may be among the shortest ever placed in front of a 960 page book, but to me it's delightfully emphatic, and it could shift a few hesitant potential readers off the fence to one side or the other. Here's its opening paragraph, which is more than half of the whole.

I shall say nothing of Johnson's life. No one should read even a selection from his writings who is not already familiar with the man. Boswell must come first. This is not to say that he is greater than his writings, or that they are only interesting because he wrote them, but that they are the utterance of the whole man: no one else could have written them. There is no disparity between himself and his work: he has not been mysteriously chosen as the vehicle for expressing something inexplicably greater than and different from himself. The man and his writings are one. To read them without knowing him - and, thanks to Boswell, he can be known better than any of the dead, better than most of the living - is to miss the vivifying power of his personality. He is often dull: unless you know him much of his writing is dead as well as dull. Many of his pages were written for bread, many in sorrow and despair, all of them in the torture of a melancholy, which he may hold off for a time but never dispels. It would be a weary if not an impossible task to read the whole of Johnson's writings without the support of a personal sympathy. His prejudices and limitations exasperate the stranger: he must be your friend before you can be tolerant and amused. Often - and most often when he is at ease and at his best - he leaves off writing, and begins to talk. You must hear the "slow deliberate utterance" and the puffings by which it is punctuated: you must be ready to sit at his feet; resent his didacticism and you may as well close the book.

I'm tentatively encouraged to explore the book, but minded to accept the admonition and refresh my memory of Boswell first.

12LesMiserables
aug 3, 2022, 5:11 am

>2 Willoyd: Yes, unfortunately that was a pretty awful and wildly prejudicial blot on his hosts.

Not Johnson's finest hour.

13cpg
Bewerkt: aug 5, 2022, 8:44 pm

Update to #10 above:

The Yale edition I mentioned above turns out to have a *glued* binding. Forget what I said about us being able to count on Yale University Press to make their books look nice. I guess we can't!

14abysswalker
aug 6, 2022, 9:11 am

>13 cpg: yeah, it is sad, but academic presses generally seem to have determined that glued bindings, and even garbage POD digital printing, is acceptable. At least the archival quality paper standards remain (probably a requirement of many academic library procurement systems).

Honestly maybe such standards are efficient, given that it's becoming more common for academics to access everything digitally anyways in the course of research, but as a book nerd it still makes me less than happy.

15cpg
aug 6, 2022, 10:31 am

>14 abysswalker:

During the period that an academic publisher transitions from making nice books to making ugly books, I often have a frustrating FOMO. In 2020, Yale released The Essential Works of Thomas More, and in 2021 they released The New Yale Book of Quotations, both of which were very nice (to my taste). Is Yale going to do any more like them that I will regret not having? A mathematical example is Springer which has been doing ugly print-on-demand for years, but Sheldon Axler has somehow gotten them to print his 2014 Linear Algebra Done Right and his 2019 Measure, Integration & Real Analysis in a quite lovely way.

16jroger1
aug 6, 2022, 11:40 am

>15 cpg:
I never expected my graduate mathematics texts to win beauty contests. :) It’s enough that the text be printed accurately.

17cpg
Bewerkt: aug 6, 2022, 3:14 pm

>16 jroger1:

1) Why should the physical quality of the book depend on the subject matter?

ETA: Perhaps it doesn't!

2) Is the exponent in this high-resolution scan of an Oxford University Press print-on-demand text printed accurately?

18jroger1
aug 6, 2022, 5:52 pm

>17 cpg:
If that’s some standard equation, I don’t recognize it, but that was 50 years ago. Otherwise, it could be correct or not.

Advanced math texts are expensive, and graduate students are usually poor, so sewn bindings, attractive covers, etc., were the furthest things from my mind.

I do remember a numerical analysis text, though, that fell apart as soon as I opened it. Everybody’s did. The professor complained to the publisher, but we never got new books.

19cpg
aug 6, 2022, 7:44 pm

>18 jroger1:

Thanks for your reply. My point with the scan was just that printing an "s" so it doesn't look like an "8" shouldn't be considered a luxury!

20jroger1
aug 6, 2022, 8:57 pm

>19 cpg:
Correct. My initial statement should have been “it’s enough that the text be printed CLEARLY AND accurately.”

21ironjaw
aug 22, 2022, 3:50 pm

>19 cpg: Goes, to look up the author and work as is going to be studying maths, linear algebra, calculus, etc. in the fall.

22treereader
aug 23, 2022, 5:14 pm

>19 cpg:

Ha! I didn't even see the "8" until you pointed it out. I guess I have "Math Goggles".