ABSTRACT
The second piece of evidence, though more circumstantial, is equally valuable for indicating Johnson's familiarity with Renaissance lexicography. It consists of the massive Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae (5 vols.; London, 1743-45), probably the most important English library catalogue of the eighteenth century. The bookseller Thomas Osborne purchased the library in 1742 from the estate of
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Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, for £13,000. 6 Michael Maittaire, William Oldys, and Johnson worked on preparing the catalogue. Mattaire's contribution to the work, so far as we know, was limited to the Latin dedication to Volume I and, possibly, the development of the complex classification scheme.• Johnson and Oldys were responsible for the cataloguing of the library and for the bibliographical descriptions which make the Catalogus unique in English bibliography before the age of Dibdin. To ascertain whether Johnson or Oldys wrote a particular description is, as Hawkins points out, difficult, but there is a strong possibility that Johnson went through many if not all of the library's immense collection of 345 dictionaries and that he was responsible for the 47 bibliographical descriptions of these volumes which are contained in Volumes II and III. 7 Some of the Harleian dictionaries are the very editions which later were recorded in Johnson's library. Although it cannot be known whether Johnson acquired any of his books from the library he helped catalogue, at least we have a readily identifiable source for his acquaintance with them.
