The full title of this work is Tables of Weights and Prices, on a New Plan; by Which the Value of Any Quantity of Goods, sold by Avoirdupois Weight, from a Single Pound to Five Tuns, and from Two Shillings to Ten Pounds Ten Shillings per Hundred, May Be Known Without the Labour of Multiplying or Dividing. Particularly Useful to Dealers in Hops, Wool, Hay, Cheese, Grocery, and Other Commodities. Elmer’s Tables (1758) was published by John Newbery, who seems to have asked Johnson for the preface, as he had for Rolt’s Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756) and Lindsay’s Evangelical History (1757).1 As F. V. Bernard has observed, Johnson’s preface provides the only prose in Elmer’s 217 pages, and Johnson may have been thinking of this when he wrote in Idler 37 (30 December 1758), “The intercourse of society is maintained without the elegancies of language. . . . The commerce of the world is carried on by easy methods of computation.”2 Nothing is known of J. Elmer except that he appears to have lived in Farnham, Surrey.