The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. including A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides...

London: John Murray, 1831. Octavo (23 cm); 5 volumes. Extra-illustrated with 197 (give or take) black-and-white engravings (some folding) and 16 color stipple engravings including portraits, facsimiles, scenes, and a map. Handsomely re-cased in 20th-century tan buckram with leather labels on spines titled in gilt. Some offsetting onto text pages from opposing plates, but otherwise the text is in excellent condition.

Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is a book that names names. Johnson, during his long life, came into contact with virtually everyone in British society who left a footprint, and Boswell names them all. John Wilson Croker's edition of Boswell's great biography-offered here in its initial printing-inspired something of a fashion for collectors to gather up printed portraits of the figures named in the biography, and have them bound into their copies of Croker's Boswell opposite the pages where the figure is named or discussed. The majority of the portraits, scenes, facsimiles, and maps in this copy date from the first quarter of the 19th century, while a few were printed in the late 1700s and the most recent ones date from the 1840s. Celebrity portraits include those of Johnson, Boswell, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Richardson, Rousseau, Sterne, Catherine the Great, Leibnitz, Byron, Swift, Joseph Banks, Voltaire, Madame de Sévigné, Captain Cook, Thomas Gray, John Donne, Adam Smith, Walter Scott, Joseph Addison, Thomas Brown, Montaigne, Drake, Milton, and many, many, many others.