with Johnson's supposed victory against Osborne. Around 1777, Hester Lynch Thrale wrote in her diary: "I asked [Johnson] the other day about his combat with that Osborne, how much of the story was true: 'It was true,' said he 'that I beat the fellow, and that was all; but the world so hated poor Osborne that they have never done multiplying the blows and increasing the weight of them for twenty years together.' " Many retellings of the story mention that Johnson used a heavy folio as a weapon, but this detail is absent from the earliest accounts, including the 1773 Packet article, Thrale's diary entry, and a passage in James Boswell's 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson, based on Boswell's direct conversation with Johnson. Alexander Pope mocked Osborne in the 1743 edition of The Dunciad, where Osborne takes the place of a character, called "Chetwood" or "Chapman" in previous editions, who loses a urinating contest for the love of novelist Eliza Haywood. Osborne had apparently angered Pope by deceptively selling remaindered copies of his translation of the Iliad. Osborne earned his share of praise as well; Thomas Dibdin, writing decades after Osborne's death in his Bibliomania (1809), called him "the most celebrated bookseller of his day." Some of this negative reputation has persisted until the present: in a 1997 article, Robert DeMaria Jr. of Vassar College called him "relatively crude and rapacious", while Peter Martin described him as "tasteless and ill-mannered" in a 2008 biography of Johnson. In 2004, O. M. Brack gave a more undecided evaluation in Osborne's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: However, to assess Osborne's character properly is difficult. His undoubted success as a bookseller provoked an adverse reaction from other members of the trade who were eager to see his power and influence diminished. Most of the negative comments that have survived can be traced to Pope and Johnson. To be singled out by Pope is no distinction as the list of his satiric victims is extensive, while Johnson, whose lack of social skills is well documented, is a strange source for Osborne's failures in this regard. After his death on 21 August 1767, Osborne was buried in the cemetery of St Mary's Church in Islington. His will divided his possessions among his wife, Anne; his brother-in-law William Smith; and his nephew William Toll. References Further reading Stephen Botein, "The Anglo-American Book Trade