Today's Google Doodle Celebrates Samuel Johnson's 308th Birthday

I am glad to see a complete edition is now easily available online. Still only 9% transcribed.

http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com

Only a few years ago, the only trace on free scanned sources was a misleading 'improved' (mangled) edition re-published decades after Dr. Johnson's death.

There was an academic CD-ROM version made, which I recall had aspirations to publish online, but I believe copyright profit-seeking obstructed this then.

The first edition is a massive almost 2x1ft, 22lbs, 2 volumes. And the most extraordinary part, for those unacquainted, are the illustrative quotations accompanying the definitions, which Johnson culled and compiled by his lonesome.

He quoted Macrobius in his interview for prep school as a young child, ensuring him a spot. We learn this from Boswell's Life of Johnson, one of the first sources in English of extensive transcriptions of direct speech.

I had a wonderful, now gone, Modern European History teacher in high school, Mr Kurtz, who wrote and performed a one act play on Johnson's life.