Why it matters

Rolt's dictionary is one of the mid-eighteenth-century English commercial encyclopedias — commodities, banking, coin, weights and measures, navigation and overseas trade — the genre that competed with Postlethwayt's Universal Dictionary and fed later economic writing. Its lasting fame is an association copy of a different kind: Samuel Johnson wrote the preface, and the episode is a standing anecdote in Johnson biography, with Arthur Murphy suggesting Johnson may have supplied material for a similar project of his own.

Why we're looking

At $177 this sits well below the only non-reprint copy we could find on the open market — a 1761 issue in Good condition, also with a detached front board and also lacking its frontispiece, offered at US$499.99 by curtis paul books via AbeBooks — and the 1761 issue is catalogued as a reissue of the 1756 first-edition sheets under a new title page, so the text is the same book. The gap is real but the condition is not great - treat this as a project copy.

Watch out for

The seller's own description is the main caution: both boards detached, blank endpapers lacking, a wrinkled final leaf, and an explicit "restoration candidate" framing — rebacking or reboxing a book of this bulk is not a cheap job, and should be priced into the total. "Otherwise complete internally" is the seller's assertion and no collation or leaf count is offered, so ask for one; also ask specifically about any engraved frontispiece or plates, since the comparable 1761 copy we found was described as containing six Bowen maps and lacking its engraved frontispiece, and the listing here says nothing either way. Confirm the title page actually reads 1756 from a photo, given that the 1761 issue uses the same sheets with a cancel title.