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Maybe I have a different copy to you, Harry; mine is the Gutenburg - Princeton 1917 edition and although there are a good few footnotes there are not thousands – at least I hope not. At all events, looking at them it seems to me these footnotes will be best inserted [in square brackets] into the body of the text as close as possible to the relevant passage. Boswell’s text is fairly fragmented anyway and I think that, for example, “The book * cannot, I think, be printed . . .” Can comfortably become “The book ['His Dictionary' - Warton] cannot, I think, be printed. . .” and so on.
The greatest test of my patience has been the massive number of words printed in Caps. I have attempted to make the text more reader friendly by reducing these to lower case italic where the sense called for it, or proper case or both, as the case may be . . . I hope this stratagem will maintain the feel of Boswell’s text whilst modernising it. Naturally, the spelling remains unchanged.
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