LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON

London: Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1791. FIRST EDITION, First State (with "gve" reading on p. 135). 267 x 210 mm. (10 1/2 x 8 1/4"). Two volumes expanded to eight..
ORNATE AND SUBSTANTIAL 19TH CENTURY FOREST GREEN STRAIGHT-GRAIN MOROCCO, covers with a gilt French fillet, raised bands, spines (and some corners) renewed with considerable skill, their compartments with urn centerpieces flanked by scrolling foliage, turn-ins gilt tooled, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. First volume with an engraved frontispiece, EXTRA-ILLUSTRATED WITH A TOTAL OF 919 PLATES, 96 of them hand colored. Each volume with an added facsimile title page. Pottle 79; Day, "History of English Literature, 1660-1837," pp. 164-65. Boards with a few dark spots (mostly where chafing has been covered with dye), the hinge at the front of seven volumes with paper covering gone (two other hinges partly affected), but everything still very tight; some (never serious) offsetting from plates, intermittent minor foxing, a handful of leaves in Vol I., Part IV with a repaired open tear to upper margin, other trivial defects, but still a set with very considerable appeal--full of visual interest internally, and looking quite grand in a substantial row.

Although there are no signs of ownership, this is the elegantly bound Jacques Levy copy of what is often considered to be the greatest biography in any language--extra-illustrated here with an enormous number of plates. James Boswell (1740-95) was a personal friend of his subject, the main reason that this work proved to be the architect of his enduring reputation. It is a tribute to Boswell's skill as a biographer that the bulk of the text is made up of accounts by the author of situations that he himself created so that his subject would be prompted to behave in a revealing and memorable way. Day tells us that Boswell "was a consummate impresario, stage-managing the setting and 'dramatis personae' amidst which Johnson would glitter, and then providing topics and opinions to elicit the magnificent rejoinders of Johnson." The result is that we see an unforgettable portrait of a man who was flawed as well as brilliant--in Day's words, "the most fully realized figure, the most three-dimensional character, in literature." Our previous owner, New York bibliophile Jacques Levy (d. 1980), first began buying on a whim while in Paris for business. He spent the next 40 years building an impressive and eclectic library, which included travel literature, illustrated books, and fine bindings. A dedicated auction of his collection took place at Sotheby's New York on April 20, 2012, realizing more than $6 million. The present copy contains more than 900 added plates which illustrate the settings and figures populating the biography, as well as expanding the two volumes into an imposing set that is quite attractive on the shelf. The first printing of Boswell's Johnson is easy to obtain, but extra-illustrated sets seem to be quite rare: except for the present item (which went for $11,250 at the Levy sale), the last such copy we could trace at auction was a four-volume set sold in 1988..