Identity, Enigma, Assemblage: John Baskerville’s Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary

The eighteenth century, as the novelist Samuel Richardson observed in 1750, might be defined as ‘an age of dictionary and index learning’. This did not, however, meet with his unequivocal approval. It is ‘a smattering that is now almost all that is aimed at’, he commented with some regret. Given the rise of the reference book, individual curiosity, he argued, was potentially sated before the appetite for knowledge had really been aroused. ‘Our study’ seems, paradoxically, ‘to get knowledge without study’, Richardson concluded.¹ Samuel Johnson—in spite of his own role as eighteenth-century lexicographer par excellence—voiced anxieties of a