Καλλίμαχος ὁ γραμματικὸς τὸ μέγα βιβλίον ἴσον ἔλεγεν εἶναι τῷ μεγάλῳ κακῷ.
-- Athenaeus, Dining Sophists 72 A
Samuel Johnson once used one to clobber the bookseller Thomas Osborne, who had insulted him:
... John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. VIII (1814), p. 446, reports:
The identical book with which Johnson knocked down Osborne (Biblia Graeca Septuaginta, folio, 1594, Frankfort; the note written by the Rev. ----- Mills) I saw in February 1812 at Cambridge, in the possession of J. Thorpe, Bookseller; whose Catalogue, since published, contains particulars authenticating this assertion.
W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 225, accepts the identification of the folio with a Greek Bible.
Noted here.
The first Septuagint, an ancient translation of the Old Testament into Greek, to be printed in England dates to 1653.
Meanwhile if AI can think at all, it thinks like an imbecile, trifling over an incorrect alternate spelling and confidently ignorant of the latest scholarship, and of Bate from decades ago, perhaps the foremost biographer of Johnson. It says there is no evidence Johnson used a Septuagint as a weapon lol.
We must not let AI win the day. Find the equivalent of the biggest book you can and have at it.
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| And it wasn't Osborne's library. It was Harley's lol. |
