| ABOUT THE COLLECTION
An 18th-century edition of a book speaks to
us in ways much different than a modern edition of the same text.
It is a more silent experience. There is no editorial clutter
on the page, no one explaining to you why this book is "a
classic." You hold in your hands the same book that Thomas
Jefferson or Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon might have held,
and in this sense the distance in time is narrowed. These writers
become our contemporaries. Their historical moment is literally
before our eyes. The words seem much more immediate, and one has
the sense of encountering an original mind thinking rather than
a "text book." These books are intended for students
to use; they are, of course, to be handled carefully within the
rare book room, but they are not museum pieces or holy relics
to be stared at in awe.
For scholars, as well, original editions offer
a great deal. In the course of two or three centuries, a book
may go through several editions, and each editor leaves something
out or distorts it in some way according to taste or historical
prejudice or mere carelessness. Then someone comes out with a
definitive scholarly edition, but that work has so much editorial
baggage attached that you have a much different sort of animal
before you - important, yes, but it offers a completely different
reading experience. It is like looking at the book through very
thick scholarly lenses. When you modernize spelling and type-fonts,
and when you change the layout on the page to accord with modern
editorial conventions, you lose sense of that 18th-century "sensibility"
which the original book is an embodiment of. For historical purposes,
there is nothing like an early edition.
This collection is centered around Samuel
Johnson, in part because the library already had the 1784 edition
of A Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson's masterpiece
and a monument in the history of the English language. It is an
immensely readable work - to be tired of The Dictionary is to
be tired of life itself. But Johnson was also the most important
literary figure in his day, and he participated in many important
developments in eighteenth-century book history, engaging not
just in dictionary-making, but also in journalism, book reviewing,
editing Shakespeare, publishing anthologies, shaping literary
taste and criticism, and so on. He was also the nominal head of
"the Club," a literary society that, according to Boswell,
"met at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard-street, Soho, one evening
in every week, at seven, and generally continued their conversation
till a pretty late hour." This club included such luminaries
as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith,
David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and many others, and of course
including Boswell himself. A collection centered around Johnson
and his Circle touches almost all aspects of 18th-century culture.
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