Thomas Osborne (publisher)

Thomas Osborne (April 1704? – 21 August 1767) was an English publisher and bookseller noted for his association with author Samuel Johnson and his purchase of the library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford.

His father, also named Thomas Osborne, was a bookseller and stationer based in Gray's Inn, London. Osborne himself was probably the Thomas Osborne, son of Thomas and Brilliana Osborne, who was baptised on 13 April 1704 in the church of St Andrew's in Holborn. Osborne probably took up a major role in his father's business sometime before 1728, when he was made a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. In 1729, the firm also issued its first catalogue, a practice for which Osborne would become famous. Osborne the elder died in 1744, leaving the business and several properties to his son.

Osborne was well known for buying large libraries and offering the books for sale at fixed prices listed in catalogues. Most famously, after Edward Harley's death in 1741, Osborne purchased for £13,000 the extensive collection that had been assembled by Harley and his father, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (Harley's collection of manuscripts was purchased by the British government and remains in the British Library as the Harleian Collection). Osborne hired William Oldys, who had been Edward Harley's literary secretary, and Samuel Johnson to compile a catalogue of the collection, which eventually ran to five volumes published from November 1742 to April 1745 under the name Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae. Osborne sold the first two volumes of the catalogue for ten shillings, which created enough irritation among his customers that he announced in the third edition that the price of the catalogue could be either applied to the purchase of a book from the collection or refunded. Oldys and Johnson also compiled for Osborne The Harleian Miscellany, an eight-volume selection of 16th and 17th-century political and religious pamphlets, which was published from 1744 to 1746.

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