Let's Get Reading: Newsletter 79

“The more you write, the bigger the imagined world gets. And the other life stays on the chair, quiet, where the body is still.” – Yu Hua

Hot Off The Press

It turns out, stunt marketing gimmicks aren’t as recent a concept as you might think. When Samuel Johnson published his first major poem, London, he wasn’t yet the towering literary figure we know today. But he was clearly a pretty shrewd businessman.

A little biographical detail to set the scene.. Born in 1709 in Lichfield, Samuel Johnson was one of the key players in the 18th Century British literary scene. As seems to be the case with many of his contemporaries, he was regularly battling illness, money troubles, and depression, but made his name in London as a legendary conversationalist. (Note to self: that’s a good reputation to have). He was a writer, critic, lexicographer and dictionary-inventor, sort of – he’s best known for creating A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, which technically was the second ever dictionary, but, it was the first proper one so that settles that. And he wrote essays, poetry, moral reflections, a novel (Rasselas), and a series of literary biographies (Lives of the Poets).

One of these days I’m going to do a newsletter segment about Johnson’s dictionary for sure. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Today, it’s all about his marketing genius.

The year was 1738, and Johnson was an ambitious 28-year-old, struggling with poverty and anonymity. The city was teeming with writers and he knew he had to do something to set himself apart from the pack. So after a bit of thinking, he made a choice that, on the face of it, seems like an odd one. He made an intentional spelling mistake.