Genius Fan

In summer 2021 I bought a set of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. That was how my hobby of studying the Eighteenth century and book collecting kicked off. We didn’t have a bookcase back then, and the 14 volumes I collected sat stacked up on the sideboard in the living room. I looked for the cheapest hardback versions of each book and bought them from Ebay, Abebooks, Oxfam online and others. Weirdly, I bought a Folio Society edition of Boswell’s London Journal, there are no dust jackets for the first six volumes (I didn’t think dust jackets were a thing back then), the cheapest volume I bought was Boswell for the Defence (£5.52) and the most expensive volume was The Applause of the Jury (£27.99).

1. Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, (1950)
2. Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 (1952)
3. Portraits, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1952)
4. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (1953)
5. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766 (1955)
6. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769 (1956)
7. Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774 (1959)
8. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1773, (1961)
9. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776 (1963)
10. Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (1970)
11. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782 (1977)
12. Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785 (1981)
13. Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789 (1986)
14. Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789–1795 (1989)

Notes
Yale University internet page – I wore out this intranet page back in 2021.