You Could Look It Up (48 page)

Because of these delays—often stretching over several generations—reference books sometimes change their character over the decades.
Some compilers make the same estimate that David Copperfield's classmate did and realize that, at their current scale, their projects will take lifetimes, and they resolve to pick up the pace. Volume 1 of the first
Encyclopædia Britannica
, for example, covered
Aa
through
Bzo
. Had William Smellie continued to allot pages at the same rate throughout the project, the result might have been ten or a dozen volumes. But plans changed: he rushed through the rest of the alphabet in just two volumes. The early seventeenth-century Spanish dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias is similarly unbalanced: the entries for A, B, and C are much longer than those for the rest of the alphabet. Covarrubias, who was sixty when he began his project, feared he might not live to see its completion.

Usually, though, later volumes take a more leisurely approach to publication. In 1732, Johann Heinrich Zedler thought his
Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon
would occupy twelve volumes; by the time he reached the middle of the alphabet he had already published eighteen. Instead of picking up the pace, he slowed down even further: the second half of the alphabet took not eighteen volumes but an additional forty-six—“with the letter
U
alone occupying six volumes and the letter
S
occupying nine.”
8
The would-be-twelve-volume encyclopedia eventually filled sixty-four. (Even that looks puny next to Johann Georg Krünitz's
Oekonomische Encyclopädie oder allgemeines System der Staats- Stadt- Haus- und Landwirthschaft
, 1773–1858, in an overwhelming 242 volumes and 170,000 pages.) And over the century and a half it took to appear, the Grimms changed policy on quotations in their
Wörterbuch
, partly because there was much more German literature to quote. The amount of detail also increased in the later volumes: to pick three related adjectives,
blau
‘blue' appeared in 1860 and took up two columns;
rot
‘red' in 1893 occupied thirteen;
grün
‘green' in 1935 filled twenty-six.
9

The Assyrian Dictionary
, based at the University of Chicago, is an all-too-typical case of how reference publishing progresses. The project was mapped out in 1921: a six-volume dictionary of three thousand pages. But after the Second World War, when the team had worked for a quarter century with no volumes to show for it, the publishers began applying pressure. The staff was ordered to begin publishing in 1947 and
to finish no later than 1957. Those deadlines began slipping almost immediately. The first volume appeared in 1956, and by then it was clear that six volumes would not be enough—they would need twenty.

In 1972, more than half a century into the ten-year project, the team promised to finish by 1980; by 1977, when volume 14 appeared, the completion date was pushed back to 1984. In 1991, the project's seventieth anniversary, the annual reports began talking about imminent completion and thinking about what the Oriental Institute would do next: “While the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is the immediate goal … we have also started formulating plans for the future use of the data.” Still the work dragged on. In 1995 the editorial board was reorganized, and a three-year grant in 1997 made clear that the project would go into the next millennium. At some point the press informed the Library of Congress that the project would be finished by 2006—the date that appears in the catalog—but even that deadline was missed.

A single volume tells the story. The editors started on
P
in 1994, thinking it the work of about a year. At first they seemed more or less on track: “Final editing of the P Volume occupied Professors Reiner and Roth,” the annual report for 1995–96 declared, “and they have finished editing most of the volume. The edited articles are prepared for final checking.” In June of the next year, they had “finished editing the last of the draft articles for the P.” But “During the 1997/98 academic year, the staff of the CAD continued to devote most of our energy to the P and R volumes.” The next year's report opens with essentially the same sentence: “During the 1998/99 academic year, the staff of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project devoted most of our energy to the P volume.” Only in the 1999–2000 annual report were they able “to report that … we sent the P volume of the
Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
(CAD) to press.” By 2000–1 the book was in galleys. They were still reading those galleys in 2001–2, and in 2002–3 it was finally “being typeset.” Only in July 2005 did the volume appear. The product of eleven years' intensive labor,
P
took longer than the original editors projected for the entire dictionary.
10
The entire project was completed in 2011, twenty-six volumes and ninety years in the making.

Things are no swifter in the high-tech twenty-first century.
The third edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
was begun in the mid-1990s, with plans to finish by 2010. But by 2010, the editors had completed less than a third of the alphabet, and current estimates place the final publication date sometime around 2034—though the smart money says that when 2034 rolls around, the editorial team will still be valiantly working its way through the alphabet.

CHAPTER
19

AN ALMS-BASKET OF WORDS

The Reference Book as Salvation

High-minded Victorians took reference books seriously as a way of improving the lot of the less fortunate. Nineteenth-century compilers wanted their works to be useful in as many ways as possible.

One handy guide that would be owned by virtually every reader in Victorian England was
Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and Assistant to Railway Travelling
(1839), the earliest (and most long-lasting) guide to moving around Great Britain on the newly invented railroads. George Bradshaw—born in Lancashire, England, in 1801—arrived in the world at nearly the same time as the locomotive, which was invented in 1804, and for more than a century, his name was synonymous with the technology that revolutionized travel.

Another technology was behind another ubiquitous reference book, the phone book.
1
The first one,
The Telephone Directory
, appeared in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. In his
Dictionary
, Samuel Johnson had noted that the word
Bible
came from Greek
biblion
‘book’, adding that “The sacred volume in which are contained the revelations of God” was “called, by way of excellence,
The Book
.” One hundred thirty years later, in a story in the December 1885 issue of
Cassell’s Family Magazine
, a character mused, “In a minute Charlie was in my boudoir, and was ringing to the Central Exchange. I looked in the book; the fire number was something—I forget what.” “The book” had taken
on a whole new meaning as the telephone directory became central to people’s lives.

Aristotle advised students in his
Rhetorica
to take good notes on their reading and to arrange them under topical headings, rubrics such as “on goodness.”
2
Latin readers, too, were told to look for
sententiae
—that is, maxims, aphorisms, or memorable statements. These “sentences” were bits of wisdom that could be carried around and trotted out when appropriate. Good readers were advised to collect important quotations for themselves. Blank books gave readers the chance to copy their favorite passages. At their worst, these so-called commonplace books were little more than clichés mindlessly strung together, reflecting no actual reading or wisdom, just the ability to parrot moralistic bromides. Shakespeare’s Polonius, for instance, is a walking commonplace book: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be …” But these compendia were an essential part of a Renaissance education, and at their best, they encouraged readers to read with newfound attention. For a keeper of a commonplace book, reading and writing were linked activities.

Commonplace books were originally do-it-yourself exercises, but eventually people began publishing collections of commonplaces. At the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, for instance, Desiderius Erasmus began publishing his quotations in a work known as the
Adagia
(
Adages
, 1500), which went through dozens of editions, growing larger with each new publication. Throughout the sixteenth century, these collections were bestsellers all over Europe. John Merbecke’s
Booke of Notes and Common Places, with Their Expositions, Collected and Gathered out of the Workes of Diuers Singular Writers, and Brought Alphabetically into Order
(1581) helped Protestant readers find their way around religious writings. English readers were especially fond of Italian compilations. Giovanni Andrea Grifoni published
A Comfortable Ayde for Scholers, Full of Variety of Sentences
in the sixteenth century, and David Rowland provided an English version in 1568; Francesco Sansovino’s
Quintesence of Wit: Being a Corrant Comfort of Conceites, Maximies, and Poleticke Deuises
came out in English in 1590.
Sansovino collected his wit and wisdom from a range of classical authors, including Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, Sallust, Suetonius, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Sansovino’s 803 snippets appear in no particular order, but a topical index at the end directs readers to the entries on subjects such as “Affirmations,” “Agents,” “Old Age,” “Ambition,” “Art of warre,” and so on. His “sentences,” though, appear without citations—not even authors’ names. The result is a collection of wisdom, authorized by a list of great names, belonging not to individual writers but to the culture as a whole.

Later came the single-author quotation collection. One successful example is
Beauties of Shakespear
, a two-volume work that appeared in London in 1752. Its compiler was William Dodd, then a deacon in the Church of England but eventually a prominent priest. Dodd spent some time serving as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield, the would-be patron of Johnson’s
Dictionary
, and he would write a
Commentary on the Bible
in the late 1760s. At the beginning of his career as a writer, though, he was interested in a different kind of scriptural exegesis—that of England’s greatest writer. Shakespeare’s supremacy was not yet taken for granted in 1752; he was still making the long transition from very good old-fashioned playwright to literary demigod. An entire reference book dedicated to an English writer would still have struck most people as a questionable enterprise. But Dodd insisted that Shakespeare was uniquely deserving of a collection of quotations, and he was proud to serve up “such a collection of
Beauties
, as perhaps is no where to be met with, and, I may safely affirm, cannot be parallell’d from the productions of any other single author, ancient or modern. There is scarcely a topic, common with other writers, on which he has not excelled them all; there are many, nobly peculiar to himself, where he shines unrivall’d.” Many of Shakespeare’s greatest lines are reproduced in Dodd’s
Beauties
. The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy appears, for instance, under the heading “Life and Death weigh’d”; under “The different sorts of Melancholy” is this passage from
As You Like It
: “I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these.”
3

Dodd hoped his
Beauties
would not merely entertain his readers but would edify them as well—from Shakespeare, readers would learn valuable lessons of morality. But he should have paid more attention to a passage he included under “A Father’s Advice to his Son, going to travel,” in which Polonius adviseed Laertes against being a borrower or a lender. In 1777, Dodd found himself in debt, and he forged Lord Chesterfield’s name on a bond worth £4,200—this at a time when a middle-class family could live comfortably on less than £100 a year. When the forgery was discovered, he was sentenced to death by hanging. Samuel Johnson pleaded for mercy, and more than twenty thousand people joined in signing a petition begging the crown to commute the sentence. It was in vain. Dodd was hanged at Tyburn in 1777, after prompting one of Johnson’s more memorable quotations: “Depend upon it, Sir,” he said, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
4