![]() All those Dictionary slips,- opines Winchester, -were medication, became his therapy.- When he describes the original O.E.D.’s “twelve tombstone-sized volumes,” we get a whiff of the grueling mental task exacted from its servants by the work, reminiscent of the labors involved in Melville’s classic “Bartleby the Scrivener”-in a book that is similarly a psychological masterwork. Latterly ailing (and sexually repressed), he clung to his lexicographic efforts for dear life and the sake of his sanity-or what remained of it. Minor, apparently a paranoiac killer, had committed murder in 1872 to his lasting travail, he-d witnessed atrocities in the American Civil War. William Chester Minor, was incarcerated for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. editor Professor James Murray headed off to meet a major contributor (of more than 10,000 entries) to his epochal reference work, he discovered that this distinguished philologist, Dr. ![]() His account is studded with odd persons and unexpected drama. ![]() ![]() Manchester Guardian journalist Winchester (The River at the Center of the World, 1996 Pacific Rising, 1991) turns from Asia toward that most British of topics: the Oxford English Dictionary. Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity.
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