"rum books" which would not have sold in the London market. Osborne, along with Mary Cooper, Ralph Griffiths, and John Baldwin, was one of the major publishers of works by the prolific writer and botanist John Hill. In an era when royalties for authors were virtually unknown, Hill's contracts with Osborne entitled him to periodic payments if the books whose copyright he assigned to Osborne sold unexpectedly well. Osborne also took part in the Battle of the Booksellers, a prolonged effort by London publishers to win perpetual copyright protections. In 1765, he and publisher Andrew Millar sued Alexander Donaldson in the Court of Chancery over Donaldson's reprinting of books whose protection under the Statute of Anne had lapsed, maintaining that the works were protected in perpetuity by a common law copyright. In the cases, Osborne v. Donaldson and Millar v. Donaldson, Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington ruled in favour of Donaldson and against common law copyright. Henley proposed that the case be brought before the House of Lords, but Osborne and Millar refused, fearing a decisive rejection of their position. In 1754, Osborne purchased a country house in Hampstead. A Chinese-style hand fan commemorating a party he held on 10 September to mark the purchase survives in a collection donated by Charlotte Guest to the British Museum. Osborne's influence was not limited to London. He served as a primary supplier of English-language books to the nascent University of Göttingen, which had embarked on a major book-buying campaign in the decades after its founding in 1734 and had by 1800 accumulated around 17,000 English works. His large catalogues of the 1760s circulated around the literary capitals of continental Europe; philosopher Christian August Wichmann consulted one while researching his 1788 translation of John Cary's Essay on the State of England's Trade. Reputation and legacy Osborne was sometimes mocked for his supposed short stature, ignorance, and abrasive manner. According to one often-repeated story, Osborne once visited Samuel Johnson to complain about his slowness in compiling the either Harleian catalogue or The Harleian Miscellany—irritating Johnson enough that he knocked Osborne to the floor. The event seems to have taken place around 1742, but its first known mention came about thirty years later, in a 1773 article in The London Packet. The article described an incident where writer Oliver Goldsmith had attacked bookseller Thomas Evans, publisher of The Packet, and mockingly contrasted Goldsmith's defeat