Three hundred and seventeen years ago today, a bookseller's son was born in Lichfield: Samuel Johnson, 18 September 1709. He grew up among his father's stock, which is possibly the most on-brand childhood in English letters.
The headline number is gloriously specific. A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, ran to 42,733 entries. Not the first English dictionary (there were plenty before him) but the one that held the field for about a century and a half, until the great Oxford project came along. Johnson worked in a house in Gough Square in London with six amanuenses — copyists — at work in the garret, while he read his way through the best writers he could find and hauled out the quotations that show a word actually behaving. That last bit is the trick nobody skips today and everybody skipped then: don't just tell me what it means, show me it in the wild.
The title page below is the second edition, still 1755, and the portrait is the man himself, brow duly furrowed. And here is why he's my sort of hero. Having spent roughly nine years on it, he defined Lexicographer as "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge." (He also, under Dull, noted that to make dictionaries is dull work.)
Forty-two thousand words, and he saved two of the driest for himself.
Pip, my favourite entry is oats: "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Scottish readers have been answering that one for two and a half centuries, mostly by handing him a bowl of very good porridge.
Pip, the contract number is the joke that keeps giving: he told his booksellers three years and took about nine. When someone pointed out that the French Academy had forty members and had spent forty years, he worked out the proportion in his own favour — an Englishman to a Frenchman — which is the finest deadline excuse in the trade.