Genius Fan

Appendix 5 to James Caudle’s excellent article entitled Editing James Boswell, 1924-2010: Pasts, Presents, Futures shows the estimated number of volumes one should expect to find across an edition of a range of historical papers. He’s focused on the Scottish writer and lawyer James Boswell (1740-1795), and his appendix (not the one in Caudle’s abdomen, but the one at the end of his article) is there to illustrate the scale of the undertaking of the editorial team working in the ‘Boswell factory’…in comparison to projects publishing papers belonging to a range of mostly Eighteenth century individuals. My interest is mostly only in Boswell, but a couple of years ago I discovered that in the same way Boswell’s papers were being edited and published, so too were the papers of many others of his contemporaries, including Horace Walpole (1717-1797), or Voltaire (1694 – 1778) or George Washington (1732-1799).

So, I was interested to read that of Boswell’s papers we should expect 40 volumes. That article was written in 2010 and as of 2025 I calculate there are 28 volumes (14 x trade volumes and 14 x research volumes). The illustration shows what a run of 28 books (of the thickness of the first Boswell’s London Journal 1762-63 volume) would look like. It’s a lot. If the average thickness of a Yale Boswell volume is 4cm, that would make 28 volumes measure 1.12m in width. Caudle’s appendix list highlights that the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson has 23 volumes (that number has not changed). The George Washington Project has 63 volumes and The Complete Works of Voltaire was estimated to reach 107 volumes, but now has 205 volumes! If the average width of one of the Voltaire volumes is the same as that of the Yale Boswell, 4cm, that would make the run of the Complete Works of Voltaire stretch to a whopping 8.2m in length.

Notes
No books were opened in the writing of this little post. It’s all been online.