[1] – 21 August 1767) was an English publisher and bookseller noted for his association with author Samuel Johnson and his purchase of the library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford.

Osborne probably took up a major role in his father's business sometime before 1728, when he was made a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

Osborne hired William Oldys, who had been Edward Harley's literary secretary, and Samuel Johnson to compile a catalogue of the collection, which eventually ran to five volumes published from November 1742 to April 1745 under the name Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae.

Henley proposed that the case be brought before the House of Lords, but Osborne and Millar refused, fearing a decisive rejection of their position.

A Chinese-style hand fan commemorating a party he held on 10 September to mark the purchase survives in a collection donated by Charlotte Guest to the British Museum.

He served as a primary supplier of English-language books to the nascent University of Göttingen, which had embarked on a major book-buying campaign in the decades after its founding in 1734 and had by 1800 accumulated around 17,000 English works.

[9] His large catalogues of the 1760s circulated around the literary capitals of continental Europe; philosopher Christian August Wichmann consulted one while researching his 1788 translation of John Cary's Essay on the State of England's Trade.

"[1] 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",[13] while Peter Martin described him as "tasteless and ill-mannered" in a 2008 biography of 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.