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About a decade before Samuel Johnson established his reputation with the 1755 publication of his Dictionary, he was employed by Thomas Osborne to help catalogue the library of Edward Harly, the second Earl of Oxford, creating the Harleian Miscellany, which collects many 17th & early 18th Century religious and political pamphlets found in the Harley library. Some fifty years later, this abridgement was published due to the "scarcity and high price" of the original. Ownership signature of Archibald F. Becke, dated 1923, to verso of front free endpaper, along with armorial bookplate bearing the family motto "Astute Tamen Honore".