ABSTRACT
The chapter is an account of Samuel Johnson’s role compiling the sale catalogue of the printed books owned by Robert and Edward Harley. It takes seriously Johnson’s claim in the preface that the catalogue was a work of literary history by studying his debts to the early modern genre of historia literaria pioneered by Francis Bacon and thereafter systematised by a series of mostly German scholars. Particularly, it concentrates on what Johnson learnt from the catalogues—all printed towards the end of the seventeenth century—of the libraries owned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the French parliamentarian and historian Jacques Auguste de Thou, and the Dutch textual critic Nicholas Heinsius.
