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Each operator, though initially hired asa temp, and, in some cases, no more than high-school-educated, isthe survivor of a rigorous two-week training program. (Most hiresdo not make it through training.)
Observation in 1994 of short term training of high school graduates for specific tasks which seems to hold true of similar customer service reps in 2024 based on anecdotal evidence of a friend who does customer service training.
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OCLC owns the largestdatabase of bibliographic information in the world, and it o ers aservice called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer oldcatalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from ftycents to six dollars per card.
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An image of the front of every card for Widener thus now exists onmicro che, available to users in a room o the lobby. (Anyinformation on the backs of the cards—and many notes do carryover—was not photographed
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theMaryland Health Sciences Library published a commemorativechapbook called 101 Uses for a Dead Catalog Card.
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At Cosumnes River College, in California, the card catalog wasceremonially put out of its misery by an o cial who pointed a gunat it and “shot” it. D
Wow!
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The cards datingfrom 1911 to 1975 at the New York State Library in Albany (whereMelvil Dewey was librarian from 1889 to 1906) were thrown awaylast month as a consequence of a historical-preservation projectinvolving the building in which they were stored.
Sad that a "historical-preservation project" resulted in the loss of such an interesting historical artifact.
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The New York Public Library, ahead of the game, renovated theentire ten-million-card catalog of its Research Libraries between1977 and 1980, micro lmed it, and threw it out.
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universities and public libraries have completed the“retrospective conversions” of their catalogs to computer databases(frequently with the help of federal Title II-C money, as part of the“Strengthening Research Library Resources” program),
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cards printed by theLibrary of Congress, Baker & Taylor, and OCLC;
In the 21st century, many library card catalog cards were commercially printed by OCLC, Baker & Taylor, and the Library of Congress
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Chancellor Edward N. Brandt, Jr., wearing ared T-shirt that said “The Great Discard,” chose a drawer of thecatalog and pulled it from the cabinet. With the help of a beamingCyril Feng, who was then the director of the library, he drew theretaining rod from the chosen drawer and let its several hundredcards ceremonially spill into a trash can decorated with coloredpaper.
The intellectual historian in me: 😱
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Discards
Baker, Nicholson. “Discards.” In The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, by Nicholson Baker, 1st ed. Vintage Contemporaries. 1994. Reprint, Vintage, 1997. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7554/the-size-of-thoughts-by-nicholson-baker/.
Originally published in Baker, Nicholson. “Discards.” The New Yorker, April 4, 1994. p. 64. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/04/04/discards
2024-02-14 Moving over some notes and quick reread.
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Baker, Nicholson. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. First edition. Vintage, 1997. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7554/the-size-of-thoughts-by-nicholson-baker/.
Tags
- customer service
- OCLC
- scanning
- library card catalog
- training
- Title II-C
- library card catalog cards
- Baker & Taylor
- guns
- card catalog rods
- References
- upcycling
- retcon
- human resources
- high school graduates
- New York Public Library
- The Great Discard
- Nicholson Baker
- Cyril Feng
- digitization
- Strengthening Research Library Resources
- Melvil Dewey
- Widener University
- bibliographies
- Library of Congress
- RETROCON
- historical preservation
- microfiche
- Edward N. Brandt Jr.
- note collection loss and damage
- XXI
- publishing
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writingslowly.com writingslowly.com
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[[Writing Slowly]] (Richard) in Ross Ashby's other card index
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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watched [[Odin Halvorson]] and [[Lea David]] in Personal Knowledge Management & Indigenous Mnemonics (Introduction)
He describes Ahren's Smart Notes as "groundbreaking" when in fact it just rehashed known techniques.
meh... teaser trailer for what, I don't know...
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indubitablyodin.medium.com indubitablyodin.medium.com
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Read [[Odin Halvorson]] in Indigenous Mnemonics and Personal Knowledge Management
I read in this area and this is the first I've heard the phrase IKS or “Indigenous Knowledge Systems”.
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alexwright.com alexwright.com
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Personal website
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www.librarything.com www.librarything.com
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https://www.librarything.com/mds
Melvil Decimal System (LibraryThing's equivalent of DDC, apparently in an attempt not to run afoul of the OCLC's Trademark.)
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blog.librarything.com blog.librarything.com
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Introducing Dewmoji: Emoji for Dewey Decimals®. A joke on Twitter about finding Emojis for every top-level Dewey Decimal class spun out of control and I ended up implementing something half-wonderful and half-terrible!
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monoskop.org monoskop.org
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news.virginia.edu news.virginia.edu
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https://news.virginia.edu/content/old-card-catalog-collaborative-effort-will-preserve-its-history The Old Card Catalog: Collaborative Effort Will Preserve Its History<br /> December 9, 2019 By Anne E. Bromley, anneb@virginia.edu <br /> Photos By Sanjay Suchak, sanjay@virginia.edu
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Curtis mentioned one example of information that he found: “One of the first drawers of the author-title catalog I looked through held a card for Benjamin Smith Barton’s ‘Elements of Botany’ [the 1804 edition]. The card indicated that UVA’s copy of this book was signed by Joseph C. Cabell, who was instrumental in the founding of the University.”Curtis checked to see if the Virgo entry included this detail, but he found no record of the book at all. “I thought perhaps that was because the book had been lost, and the Virgo entry deleted, but just in case, I emailed David Whitesell [curator in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library] and asked him if this signed copy of Barton’s ‘Elements of Botany’ was on the shelves over there. Indeed it was.
Digitization efforts in card collections may result in the loss or damage of cards or loss of the materials which the original cards represented in the case of library card catalogs.
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The information neatly typed on the cards – which library workers sometimes supplemented with handwritten notes on front and back – includes details that in many cases are not typically part of the electronic catalog system, Virgo, that the University Library switched to in 1989. At the time, the catalog was transferred by scanning that captured only the front of the cards.
Libraries may have handwritten notes on the back of library card catalog cards in the 20th century, a practice which caused data loss in the case of the Alderman Library which only scanned the front of their cards in 1989 when they made the switch from physical cards to a digital catalog.
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Created over a 50-year span from 1939 to 1989, that catalog grew to about 4 million cards in 65 cabinets with 4,000 drawers.
This is roughly 65 cabinets of 60 drawers each.
4 million cards over 50 years is approximately 220 cards per day. This isn't directly analogous to my general statistics on number of notes per day for individual people's excerpting practice, but it does give an interesting benchmark for a larger institution and their acquisitions over 50 years. (Be sure to divide by 3 for duplication over author/title/subject overlap, which would be closer to 73 per day)
Shifted from analog cards to digital version in 1989.
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americanlibrariesmagazine.org americanlibrariesmagazine.org
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https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/highsmith-purchased-by-w-w-grainger/<br /> Highsmith Purchased by W. W. Grainger
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Founded in 1956, Highsmith is a distributor of equipment, supplies, and furniture to public, academic, and school libraries.
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Library supply company Highsmith, headquartered in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, has been purchased by Lab Safety Supply, a direct-marketing subsidiary of Chicago-based facilities maintenance supplier W. W. Grainger. Terms of the acquisition, announced in the business press July 10, were not disclosed. Highsmith’s operations, with anticipated sales for 2008 in the range of $20–$30 million, will be integrated with LSS by the end of the year.
Purchased July 2008.
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resourcemate.com resourcemate.com
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www.primasoft.com www.primasoft.com
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www.primasoft.com www.primasoft.com
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https://www.primasoft.com/help/print_library_catalog_cards.htm
Software for printing library catalog cards. Small Library Pro being replaced by Handy Library Manager
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www.blyberg.net www.blyberg.net
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https://www.blyberg.net/darien-statements
The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians<br /> Written by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor<br /> Originally published April 3, 2009
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www.knapeandvogt.com www.knapeandvogt.com
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Manufacturer of index followers
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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www.wwhardware.com www.wwhardware.com
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www.leevalley.com www.leevalley.com
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https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/hardware/storage-and-organization/files/69118-index-followers
Listed as an "Index Follower". Looks to be the same model as https://www.wwhardware.com/catalog/product/view/_ignore_category/1/id/3588/s/kv-index-follower-and-track-kv047/
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/285694648119 16 drawer Gaylord Bros., Wooden card catalog offered for $1,995 on/around 2024-02-10. In excellent condition with all the rods and solid wood.
Free local pick up in Rutherford, NJ and listed for $513 shipping to Los Angeles.
Cost per drawer (without shipping): $133
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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My first spread doing this, I am so excited :D
quote from u/Panna1207 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18uqjwk/my_first_spread_doing_this_i_am_so_excited_d/
https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/search/?q=spread&restrict_sr=1
First time I've seen a photo of a commonplace book referred to a "spread" which is more commonly seen in Bullet Journal contexts.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Some weeks ago I explain the philosophy of Antinet Zettelkasten to my girlfriend. She was sceptical at that moment but when she saw my purple metal box full of cards and dividers she started to gather information and with her father made this one. The name is zauberkasten (magic box in german) and this is not the final version. Hope you like folks! :)
by u/osservazione at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1anwrez/zauberkasten_work_in_progress/
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press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu
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www.librarything.com www.librarything.com
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https://www.librarything.com/topic/85852
People circa 2010 interested in exporting their Library Thing book data to print out on library card catalog cards.
(I'm not the only one...)
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www.lapl.org www.lapl.org
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The smallest collection of card catalogs is near the librarian’s information desk in the Social Science/Philosophy/Religion department on lower level three. It is rarely used and usually only by librarians. It contains hundreds of cards that reflect some of the most commonly asked questions of the department librarians. Most of the departments on the lower levels have similar small collections. Card catalog behind the reference desk on lower level three, photo credit: Tina Lernø
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The surname Index for the library’s genealogy includes 315 drawers of about 750 cards each for a total of more than 236,250 cards patrons can use when they visit the History/Map/Travel section, photo credit: Diana Rosen
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The delight-inducing art piece, A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, is featured in the two elevator cars on the north side of the building, accessible in the Tom Bradley Wing.One car has cards for the "Comprehensive" and the other for the "Complete" works of various authors and topics. When moving, the elevator cars expose cards in the shaft window that reflect books that are found on the floor the elevator is passing.Artist David Bunn was given nearly 2 million catalog cards to play with for his art installation, yet he only used a little more than 9,500 in the two elevator cars. He has, since the early 1990s, been creating art projects, found poetry, and sculptures with the remaining cards.
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www.levenger.com www.levenger.com
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https://www.levenger.com/products/vintage-library-catalog-cards-set-of-50?variant=43444256243861
These don't have the pre-drilled holes, but at least are still offered, though at the price gouging cost of $14.50 for 50 (in 2024).
Cost per card: $0.29
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www.levenger.com www.levenger.com
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https://www.levenger.com/products/card-catalog-box?variant=43007544066197
A bit on the small side, but has a built in pen holder:
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www.universityproducts.com www.universityproducts.com
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/235422435211
37 books listed 133 - 3.59 each 148 - 4 185 - 5 222 - 6
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www.facebook.com www.facebook.com
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h/t Eric Sinclair, whose wife went to Indiana University
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Democratic-Culture-Mortimer-Intellectual/dp/0230337465
The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) by Tim Lacy
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www.fdrlibrary.org www.fdrlibrary.org
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/enabeh and u/Busy-Feeling-1413 interested in zettelkasten pedagogy
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Local file Local file
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"slip" appears in the book 284 times<br /> "zettel" appears once, in the context of the German dictionary
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any of his words did not getinto the Dictionary, such as one for Brizvegas, the local nickname forBrisbane, but thousands of others did.
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All thequotations have one thing in common – they hail from the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
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surrounded by leafy rubbertrees and frangipanis
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turn off the light, and take off his shirt, his shorts, and his underwear.
Mr Collier had a special technique. He cut out the quotations and, dipping a brush in sweet-smelling Perkins Paste glue, he stuck the quotation onto the slip. It was quick, and some nights he could get through 100 slips. Just him and the sound of his scissors, the incessant croak of cicadas, and the greasy smell of the neighbour’s lamb chops hanging in the close air. Around midnight, he would stop work, gather up the scraps of paper, clear the table,
zettelkasten and nudity!!!
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Those times are better captured in the ten volumes, 414,825entries, and 1,827,306 quotations that were finally published in 1928.
The first edition of the Oxford English dictionary was published in 1928 in 10 volumes containing 414,825 entries and 1,827,306 quotations.
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Despite a weak constitution, hewould walk several miles a day in the countryside of his native Lincolnshire,spotting plants and making copious notes in his diary, which he carried, alongwith a pen and inkpot, in one of the many special inner pockets that he hadsewn into his jacket.
Adrian was the son of Edward Peacock.
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On 3 June 1912 Edward Peacock wrote inshaky handwriting to James Murray from his deathbed: ‘I have been so longill – more than a year and a half, and do not expect ever to recover, that Ihave made up my mind to discontinue The Oxford English Dictionary for thefuture.’ He added in a postscript, ‘I am upwards of eighty years of age.’ Bythen Peacock had been a volunteer for the Dictionary for fifty-four years,making him one of the longest-serving contributors. He had submitted24,806 slips and had given great service to Murray not only as a Reader butas a Subeditor and Specialist too.
One of the longest serving OED contributors, Edward Peacock wrote 24,806 slips over 54 years which comes to approximately 1.25 notes per day.
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another word which he invented but whichwas never picked up by anyone else: crinanthropy, judgement or criticism ofother people.
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These included Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, who went on to be one of themost significant philanthropists of the early twentieth century, creating withher husband George the ideal Bournville village for workers at the Cadburychocolate factory in Birmingham
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Another science-fiction writer and vicar among the Dictionary Peoplewas the Revd Edwin Abbott Abbott, who came by his repeated last namebecause his parents were first cousins.
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‘Jirt’, as the childrencalled Tolkien (short for J.R.R.T.)
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Most of these enthusiasts were idealists who wanted to create auniversal language which would help international relations and unite theworld. This noble hope stood in contrast with – and probably in reaction to –the rise of nationalisms in the late nineteenth century. Over 150 newlanguages were created in this period, the best-known being Volapük (1879),Pasilingua (1885), Esperanto (originally called Lingvo Internacia) (1887),Spelin (1888), Spokil (1889), Mundolingue (1889), and Ido (1907).
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reading John Almon’s Anecdotes of the Life of William Pitt (1792), andproduced 600 slips, alongside her social work, in 1879.
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In 1894, she moved to Oxford andher days as a Dictionary contributor came to an end as she took up the post ofLibrarian of Manchester College, the Unitarian college that had opened itsnew buildings in Oxford the year before. The Unitarians and the college hadalways been radical – already co-educational before any other college – so theappointment of a female librarian was in keeping with its spirit. LucyToulmin Smith, with her extensive scholarship and networks, and from an oldUnitarian family, was the perfect candidate.
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Several of the books he wrotewere read for the Dictionary resulting in him being quoted eighteen times forlinguistic prosody terms such as acatalectic, not short of a syllable in the lastfoot; disyllabize, to make disyllabic; hypercatalectic, having an extra syllableafter the last complete dipody; and pyrrhic, a metrical foot consisting of twoshort syllables.
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wrote a scholarly article on the derivation of the word akimbo
where is this article?
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And, of course, he was a vegetarian, a cause he embraced in middleage. Or we might say he thought he was a vegetarian; the college chef was soworried that Mayor was abstemious and getting too thin that he added meatstock to the soups that Mayor preferred to eat. Mayor was also a teetotaller.Although he didn’t foist his diet or abstention onto others, he did spread theword in his books: Modicus Cibi Medicus Sibi, or, Nature her Own Physicianin 1880, What is Vegetarianism? in 1886, and Plain Living and High Thinkingin 1897. He contributed articles to Dietetic Reformer and VegetarianMessenger, publications of the Vegetarian Society. He became President ofthe Society in 1884, a position he held until his death in 1910 when he waseighty-five – and he attributed his healthiness in later life to his diet andascetic mode of living. Over this period, Mayor had witnessed new words fortypes of vegetarians: veg (1884), fruitarian (1893), and nutarian (1909). (Theword vegan would not appear until later, in 1944.)
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He was avoracious collector of books and when he ran out of space for them in hiscollege rooms (where he lived) he acquired a little house nearby for theoverflow. He was generous, often giving books away, and yet he still left18,000 volumes when he died, bequeathed to the library he had overseen
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the word vegetarian did not existbefore 1842 (until then, those who abstained from meat were called‘Pythagoreans’ or ‘Grahamites’)
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An article on the Scriptorium by the classical scholar Basil LanneauGildersleeve, who was a Specialist and had visited Murray in 1880,
identify and get a copy of this
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A quarter of the Americans in the address books were like Gildersleeveand Ernst, Specialists. The rest were Readers. Proportionally, there were halfas many Specialists in America than in Britain, which makes sense because adictionary editor usually wrote to a Specialist for a quick response, whileworking on a particular word, and the delay of the post to America wouldhave proved too slow for Murray and his tight schedule.
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One of Murray’s most helpful advisers on American words was aGerman living in Boston, Carl Wilhelm Ernst. Ernst was a journalist, theeditor of the Beacon newspaper, and a former Lutheran minister who hadmoved to America when he was eighteen years old. Murray wrote to thejournalist in a panic when completing the entry for public school. ‘In workingat this, I overlooked the fact that we had nothing for the US use, and findmyself now almost stranded, and unable to complete the article.’ He wrote toErnst asking for illustrative quotations and for clarification on the Americansense of the word: ‘It is said to be synonymous with Common School. I donot know which of these is the official appellation, and which the popular, orwhether they are both so used. We should like to know this. The designationin England has a long and rather complicated history coming down from theL. publican schola, which is already used by Jerome of Quintilian.’Murray started the entry by defining the use of public school in Englandas ‘originally a grammar-school founded or endowed for the use or benefit ofthe public’ but more recently, in the nineteenth century, as ‘the old endowedgrammar-schools as have developed into large boarding-schools, drawingfrom the well-to-do classes of all parts of the country or of the empire’. Henoted that ‘the ancient endowed grammar-schools or colleges of Eton,Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury’ aresometimes referred to as ‘the Seven Public Schools’. He contrasted this senseof public school with that in Scotland, the British colonies and the UnitedStates of America, as a school provided at the public expense, usually free.Above six American quotations spanning from 1644 to 1903, Murray added alengthy note, thanks to Ernst’s advice, ‘The term has been used in NewEngland and Pennsylvania from the 17th c., and has been adopted in all Statesof the American Union. An early synonym was “free school”, and a later onein some States, “common school” which is now however generally confined toa school of the lowest grade or “public elementary school”.’
I recently heard someone talking about the differences in public vs. private schools in Britain and America as having opposite definitions.
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Arber also suggests to Murray in this letter that he should use atypewriter. ‘I am quite certain’, he wrote, ‘that the only way to keep down thecost of corrections is to type-write the copy’, suggesting a model called theIdeal Caligraph, no. 2 price £18. Murray did read The Snake Dance of theMoquis of Arizona but he did not buy a typewriter.
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A Professor of English at Mason College (later BirminghamUniversity), Edward Arber, kept Murray informed of new American bookswhich might provide Americanisms. He wrote to Murray on Christmas Eve1884, ‘Another book, quite a new one which I would also bring to yourattention is Bourke’s The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona. It is full ofthe latest Americanisms, such as the verb “to noon” for taking the noontiderest, while a male lover is said to “whittle”, what that is, I have no idea. Is itan Americanism for connoodle? It is a most interesting book in itself andwould refresh you, if you read it yourself.’
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The Dictionary’s coverage of the leading transcendentalist, HenryDavid Thoreau, is largely due to the monumental efforts of a single woman,Miss Alice Byington of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who sent in 5,000 slipsfrom books that included several by Thoreau:
over how long a period?
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Surprisingly, the American author who is quoted most in the OED isnot Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, but rather EdwardH. Knight, a patent lawyer and expert in mechanics who wrote the AmericanMechanical Dictionary and The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics. Knight isthe seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted morefrequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson(who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American).
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The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia,Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian,Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a bookpublished in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over elevenyears, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College andattended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry,drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth ofhis reading, from Chaucer (10,000 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips),and lumbering (1,000 slips).
Job Pierson 43,055 slips over 11 years<br /> 10.7 notes per day
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Byington shared her uncle’s interest in and support for indigenousculture and language, serving as President of the Stockbridge branch of theIndian Rights Association, and on the Education Committee for the Women’sNational Indian Associatio
Support for
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But it was her uncle, the RevdCyrus Byington, who had the greatest influence on her life and interests. Hehad been a missionary with the Brewer sisters’ father to the Choctaw NativeAmerican Communities at the old mission station in Stockbridge; he hadtranslated the Bible into Choctaw, and wrote a grammar and dictionary of thelanguage.
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The New England Telephone Company had planned to put a pole intheir front yard and workers from the company began digging the hole. Butthe Brewer sisters and Byington came out and sat in the hole, blocking theirefforts by sleeping there in a tent overnight. The telephone company installedthe pole across the road instead, making this a successful result fornineteenth-century Nimby activism.
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to scrinch, tosqueeze one’s body into a crouched or huddled position.
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gloryhole, a drawer in whichthings are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness;
compare with scrap heaps or even the method of Eminem's zettelkasten (Eminem's gloryhole ???). rofl...
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There was a high number of librarians among the Americans, such asCharles Ammi Cutter of Harvard and the Boston Athenæum (who producedAmerica’s first public library card catalogue).
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Tribes of the Extreme Northwest by the American naturalist WilliamDall was another important book on the indigenous peoples and languages ofAlaska, western Washington, and north-western Oregon
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Francis March also helped with the etymologies inWilliam Dwight Whitney’s Century Dictionary (1889–91) and IsaacFunk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language (first volume publishedin 1893).
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Francis March was a Professor of English Language and ComparativePhilology at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The study of Englishin higher education was a development of the nineteenth century, and it tooka long time for English studies to gain recognition. March’s appointment as aProfessor of English in 1857 had been the first in the world that had theprestige of a full professorship – Rutgers appointed its first English professorin 1860, Harvard in 1876, and Oxford in 1885.
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He was an early ecologicalactivist, warning against human-induced climate change before anyone else,and publishing in 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modifiedby Human Action.
Cross reference The Parrot and the Igloo.
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In this context, Marsh invited members of the American public to helpcreate a radical new dictionary of all English which applied the scientificmethod, was collaborative in its making, and was based on written evidence.They were asked to collect current words and especially to read books fromthe eighteenth century – because literature from earlier centuries was harderto get in America at the time. Marsh ended his appeal with the warning thatAmericans would be paid nothing for their help.
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in 1864, Webster’s Unabridged was published and it marked animportant moment in modern lexicography: no longer the idiosyncratic workof one man, this dictionary was the product of a collaborative team withNoah Porter as Chief Editor and the German scholar Carl A. F. Mahn asetymologist
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When Marsh sent out his appeal for American Readers, what wasknown as the ‘Dictionary War’ had been waging for some time between twoleading lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. Worcester hadbeen Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language(1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster,
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In 1858, the year after the idea of the Dictionary had been mooted by theLondon Philological Society, the New York Times informed American readersof a ‘fresh appeal to scholars, and lovers of learning and philological inquiry,for additions to their vocabulary’.
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American contributors were underlined in red in Murray’saddress books.
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Some Americans did write directly to Murray, and these – 196 ofthem – are the ones underlined in the address books. They represent 10 percent of all the Dictionary People with addresses and produced a total of238,080 slips that crossed the ocean before coming to rest on Murray’s deskin the Scriptorium.
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outfangthief, a tricky entry that took Murray three people andsix letters before he nailed its definition as ‘the right of a lord of a privatejurisdiction to claim for trial a thief captured outside the jurisdiction, and tokeep any forfeited chattels on conviction’.
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Maitland co-wrote History of English Law with Frederick Pollock.
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The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland helped Murray on current legalterms such as bail, defend, culprit, and deliverance, and also many obsoleteones such as couthutlaughe, a person knowingly harbouring or concealing anoutlaw; abishering, a misreading of mishersing, freedom from amercementsimposed by any court; compurgator, a character witness who swore along withthe person accused, in order to the acquittal of the latter; pennyland, landhaving the rental value of one penny; and contenement, holding, freehold.
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The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland
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the novelist George Meredith who lived in Box Hill, Surrey, and wouldrelish the opportunity of serving cups of refreshing Russian tea to the‘Learned Tramps’ or ‘Cranium Tramps’, as he often called them.
Cranium Tramps
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Stephen was ‘Captain of Tramps’, choosing the route, striding aheadwith his characteristic impatient snort and alpenstock in hand, and setting thetopics for conversation.
alpenstock
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The motto of the Sunday Tramps was Solvitur Ambulando, ‘It is solvedby walking.’
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informal hub was the Sunday Tramps, a group of intellectualmen brought together by Leslie Stephen every fortnight, regardless of theweather, to hike together in the countryside on the outskirts of London. Theword tramp was a popular colloquial term at the time for ‘a walkingexcursion’.
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Stephen kept sending slips toMurray for twelve years, until 1891
What was his slip total to give a notes per day calculation?
(obviously not taking into account his other work...)
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during theyears that Leslie Stephen contributed to the OED, he started his owncrowdsourced project, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Just asMurray’s Dictionary traced the lives of thousands of words, Stephen’sdictionary traced the lives of thousands of people who made a notable impacton British history. Stephen invited 653 people to write 29,120 articles. Sixty-three volumes comprising 29,108 pages were published, the first volume in1885 and the last in 1900. The DNB is still going today, under the aegis ofOxford University Press, and it now covers the lives of 55,000 people.
Presumably this dictionary also used a card index for collection? (check...)
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Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’
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That is the general sort ofanswer one gets which means ‘we write for amusement, & not tobe studied as texts; if you make school-texts of us, yours be theresponsibility!’ I believe Browning once answered a request forexplanation of a passage, with ‘I really do not know; ask theBrowning Society.’
quote from John Murray about meanings of words made up by poets
Browning's response is hilarious.
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Katharine also read her friend John Ruskin’s book The Eagle’s Nest(1872), lectures on the relationship between natural science and art, for theDictionary, writing out 1,000 slips.
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had a general suspicion of words used by poets, as expressed in a letterwritten in 1901 discussing the use of voidee-cup, a cup of wine with spicestaken before retiring to rest or at the departure of guests, in a poem by DanteGabriel Rossetti. Murray did not know the meaning of the word:
correctly and the notes could easily be spotted as counterfeit, but that only went so far.
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Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Readers who wereaunt and niece and also lesbian lovers.
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Robert Browning was a great favourite and also a greatfriend. Katharine sent in 500 slips from his Dramatic Idyls of 1879, and Amyproduced 300 slips from the same book.
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Ashbee was also quite possibly the anonymous author of an infamouspublication, My Secret Life, a narrative (likely fictitious, albeit based on theauthor’s experiences) of the 1,500 sexual exploits of a man called ‘Walter’who frequented the bars and brothels of London in the 1880s. The memoirwas in excess of a million words, coming in at 4,000 pages, over elevenvolumes. Only six copies exist today of the original print run of 475, self-published for private subscribers, but it was reprinted in the 1960s and hassince grown in reputation and fame. Its author is still unidentified, but Ashbeeis the frontrunner. Given the words sent in to the Dictionary by Ashbee, itwould not be surprising if he authored a book with chapter headings such as‘My Cock’, ‘A Frisky Governess’, and ‘My Cousin’s Cunts’ (the plural ismind-boggling!). It was only very recently, in the twenty-first century, thatMy Secret Life was read for the OED and the editors discovered that itcontained the first written evidence for the words cocksucking, cunty, fist-fuck(originally meaning masturbation), frig, fuckee, and randiness.
Ashbee could be an interesting movie idea...
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Jane Austen was the first person to write the word outsider.
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Dr Minor would read a text not for its meaning but for its words. It wasa novel approach to the task – the equivalent of cutting up a book word byword, and then placing each in an alphabetical list which helped the editorsquickly find quotations. Just as Google today ‘reads’ text as a series of wordsor symbols that are searchable and discoverable, so with Dr Minor. A manualundertaking of this kind was laborious – he was basically working as acomputer would work – but it probably resulted in a higher percentage of hisquotations making it to the Dictionary page than those of other contributors.
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Over thetwenty-three years that Minor had sent in slips to the Scriptorium, he mainlyread travellers’ tales and medical texts from the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It was the travellers’ tales that interested me because they broughtthousands of words from indigenous languages around the world into theEnglish language.
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Very early one chilly morning in October 1895, Fielding Blandfordstepped into a horse-drawn carriage with Edith Lanchester’s father and twobrothers. The four men arrived at Edith’s rented lodgings in Battersea. Theywoke the whole house with heavy banging on the front door, and FieldingBlandford forced his way in to ‘examine’ Edith. He ordered that she be takento an asylum because she was committing ‘social suicide’ by insisting on livingwith her working-class lover without marrying him. He justified this byarguing that under the Lunacy Act 1890 he would have certified her had sheattempted (normal) suicide.
Fascinating story of a kidnapping and committal of a woman in October 1895 for shacking up with a man she wasn't married to.
Ultimately gained international attention.
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There were two approaches to the treatment of patients in psychiatrichospitals at the time: a humane consideration for their well-being and possiblerecovery, or the opposite – an inhumane disregard for their personhood andpossible recovery. These different approaches were championed by twoDictionary volunteers who sat on either side of the debate: Thomas NadauldBrushfield and George Fielding Blandford.
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Ranking below Thomas Austin, who sent in 165,061 slips, and WilliamDouglas, who sent in 151,982, there is a big drop to the third-highestcontributor Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, who sent in 70,277 slips.
repetition here from before to introduce mental health...
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The man who solved the problem was an American chemist, who alsocontributed to the Dictionary, Thomas Sterry Hunt. In 1857, he had beenteaching at Laval University in Quebec and responded to an appeal by thePresident of the Montreal City Bank who was battling counterfeit notes. Huntcreated a special green ink, using chromium sesquioxide, that was pretty wellindestructible. Numerous experiments showed that you couldn’t remove itfrom the banknote without destroying the paper itself – until one chemistsucceeded in doing so, and the Canadians dropped Hunt’s invention. But theAmericans took it up, especially on the back of their banknotes, hence thecolloquial term ‘greenbacks’ for US dollar bills, which was given its own entryin the OED in 1900 and defined as ‘the popular name for one of the legal-tender notes of the U.S., first issued in 1862 and so called from the devicesprinted in green ink on the back’, alongside something rather topical at thetime but now archaic, Greenback Party, defined as ‘a party in U.S. politics,which advocated that “greenbacks” should be made the sole currency of thecountry’, and its various derivatives Greenbacker and Greenbackism.
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As long as money hasexisted, the problem of counterfeit currency has too, but it became aparticular problem once printed notes went into general circulation. Ineighteenth-century North America, Benjamin Franklin – who owned a firmthat printed money for several of the colonies – hit on the idea of misspellingPennsylvania on official currency, on the grounds that forgers would spell it
correctly and the notes could easily be spotted as counterfeit, but that only went so far.
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Developed out of real (or royal) tennis, not only were nationaltournaments established – Wimbledon in 1877 and the US Open in 1881 –but every provincial town now wanted its own lawn tennis club. Old wordstook on new meanings connected with the game – love (1880), chalk (1886),volley (1875), smash (1882), lob (1890) – and new words emerged as thegame evolved and grew in popularity – grass court (1875), first serve (1878),second serve (1878), centre court (1883), hard court (1885), doubles (1894),ground stroke (1895). Murray included reference to the game in the very firstvolume, in 1884, defining the word ace as ‘a point at rackets, lawn tennis, etc’
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The Indian languages Specialist, Edward Brandreth, had D, D4, and D5beside his name in the address books and spent tireless hours in the BritishMuseum searching for fillers. Murray sent this retired member of the IndianCivil Service a total of 35 lists of desiderata, and Brandreth sent himthousands of quotations in return.
thousands of slips...
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Alexander Beazeley, an engineer who specialized in lighthouses andsent in a total of 38,233 slips, many of which were desiderata and did notrelate to lighthouses.
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theRevd William Lees, a vicar outside Reigate who sent in a total of 18,500slips;
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Volunteers like Taylor who could fill gaps in quotations and search outdesiderata were invaluable to Murray. They were marked in the addressbooks by numbered D’s when desiderata lists had been sent to them, and by asmall Star of David sign when a third list had been sent.
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Murray responded a week later, giving instructions on how to read.This was towards the very end of his life and his instructions to Miss Taylorgive rare insight into Murray’s reading tips, especially instructions for readingfor desiderata, in this case words beginning with S, T, and U–Z: ‘I shouldsuggest looking it through and marking with a pencil dot such words as arementioned in the enclosed note, and any others that strike you as noteworthy,and then go through it copying out from the marked ones those immediatelywanted for the letters at which we are working the better parts of S & T, andsending these as soon as ready; then proceed to those in U to Z, and finallythe earlier words for our Supplement. I hope you will not find it too tedious;and I should be sorry if it were allowed to interfere with other calls.’
James Murray's instructions to Miss E. Hilda Taylor in 1914 for how to read for excerpting of useful words for the Oxford English Dictionary.
Compare this with his original instructions from circa 1879.
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The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’
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Readers were asked to choose words they considered ‘rare’ and the choice ofthese words was random – they were not guided by Murray on what wasneeded. This resulted in a dearth of quotations for common words whichultimately had to be found by Murray and his assistants. In the first part of theDictionary alone, ‘nearly the whole quotations for about, after, all, also, and,in Part I, and for any, as, in Part II, have had to be found by myself and myassistants’, he explained to the Philological Society. If he had his time again,he said that he would have directed his Readers differently, with theinstructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare,peculiar, or peculiarly used.’
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two small flaws in the Dictionary’s compilation process
It is incredibly difficult to plan in advance what to collect for any zettelkasten, even when its scope is tightly defined, like it would have been for the Oxford English Dictionary.
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And yet he desperately needed the help of Subeditors because the task wastoo massive to do alone. Two years into the job, Murray had estimated thathe had sent out 817,625 blank slips to Readers. If they returned them withquotations, and if he spent a minimum of 30 seconds reading each one andallocating it to the correct sense of an entry, it would take him three workingyears to get through a third of the materials gathered.
By the second year into his editing work on the OED, John Murray estimated that he had sent out 817,625 slips to readers.
At the average price of $0.025 for bulk index cards in 2023, this would have cost $20,440, so one must wonder at the cost of having done it. How much would this have been in March 1879 when Murray tool over editorship?
How many went out in total? Who cut them all? Surely mass manufacture didn't exist at the time for them?
Sending them out would have helped to ensure a reasonable facsimile of having cards of equal size coming back.
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Murray received a poignant letter in 1906 fromthe wife of William Sykes of South Devon who had been a one-timeassistant, and faithful Reader and Specialist for twenty-two years, sending in atotal of 16,048 slips: ‘My dear husband died last Friday, the day he receivedyour letter, he was able to read it, and wrote your name in one of the books Iam going to send you eight hours before he died. It took him an hour to writeit, but he made up his mind to do it, and did. The last words he ever wrotewere to you.’ A poignant last line from the impoverished widow reads, ‘I shallsend the books when the probate duty has been paid.’
William Sykes 16,048 slips over 22 years<br /> (approximately 2 notes per day)
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Miss Clowes of Ipswich and Miss Wheaton of Bloomsbury Square‘threw up’ (gave up)
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One might have expected that the architectresponsible for the Liverpool Public Library, and after whom its main readingroom is named, Sir James Allanson Picton, would have been an ideal Readerfor the OED but Murray wrote ‘no good’ and put a red squiggle through hisentry.
ha!
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Across the entry for T. W. Tonkin of Barnes, who had sent in nothingfor a sixteenth-century polemical work against female monarchs, The FirstBlast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by theScottish Protestant Reformer John Knox, he wrote in blue pencil, ‘Impostor –Stole the Book’
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From the moment in March 1879 whenMurray signed the contract with Oxford University Press to be the next Editorof the Dictionary, and he took possession of 2 tons of slips at his house, hisfamily was immediately part of the project (whether they liked it or not)sorting out the slips. Their house was a workplace and the family aworkforce.
Perhaps one of the first sources of counting slips in weight rather than number!
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Helwich was the fifth-highest contributor
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The most prolific Reader in Europe – we might call him a ‘super-contributor’ – was Hartwig Helwich, a professor at the University of Viennawho wrote out the entire Cursor Mundi onto 46,599 slips. His efforts madethe medieval poem the second-most-frequently cited work in the Dictionaryafter the Bible (though in the current OED, it has dropped to eleventh in thetop sources).
This practice of writing out everything onto slips sounds like that used later (double check the timing) by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in creating their slip corpus for later work.
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It was left to a handful of keen British scholars, by no means part of themainstream, to encourage others to take up Continental philology. Murrayand his colleagues at the London Philological Society, especially its foundersEdwin Guest, Henry Malden, and Thomas Hewitt Key, were main players inenlivening the British linguistic scene and adopting the methods ofContinental philology. Now known as ‘the oldest learned society in GreatBritain dedicated to the study of language’, the Philological Society wasfounded in 1842 as a forum for discussion, debate, and work on developmentsin philology. But all this innovation came comparatively late, and theGrimms, who were made honorary members of the London PhilologicalSociety in 1843, were at the heart of the European innovations. Theyinfluenced Continental philology; they practised the application of historicalprinciples; they pioneered the descriptive method of defining and tracing aword’s meaning across time; and they forged the crowdsourcing techniquesand lexicographic policies and practices adopted by the OED editors.
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The study ofwords and language, otherwise known as ‘philology’, was all the rage inEurope at the turn of the nineteenth century. European scholars haddeveloped their own methodologies to compare languages and to trace thesource of a word, which became known as ‘Continental philology’. It was halfa century until Britain took up these methods, which are still practised todayand form the basis of comparative linguistics
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We think of the OED as a radical dictionary because of its size, itsscholarship, and its methods, and it was radical for English. But if youcompare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in themid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe. English wasrelatively late to the table. The English editors were able to pick and choosethe best methods from different European dictionaries. The OEDimplemented European lexicographic practices, and advanced upon them, tocreate something truly revolutionary, something that would in fact end upbeing the envy of Europe.
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A section of a wall of slips in the Grimmwelt Museum showinghow the Brothers Grimm pioneered the methods used by theOED twenty years later.
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By the time the OED project commenced, Europe already had majordictionaries under way or completed in German, French, Italian, Russian, andDutch, all of which were taking advantage of the new methodologies ofContinental philology. In Germany, the Brothers Grimm had begun theDeutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. In France, Émile Littré had begun theDictionnaire de la langue française in 1841 (a dictionary of post-1600French). In the Netherlands, Matthias de Vries had begun Woordenboek derNederlandsche Taal in 1852 (a dictionary of post-medieval Dutch).
Oxford English Dictionary (1857 - )
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showing the hundreds of volunteers who corresponded with the brothers; theeditors’ lists of words and statistical counts of entries; the tracing ofetymology using the new scientific philological methods of the day; thegathering of citations from historical, published sources. I had worked in theOED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum lookedidentical.
They looked exactly like the slips sent into the OED by the Dictionary People. There was a world map
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, a previous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said she "had worked in the OED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum looked identical" to them. She indicated that the similarity of the dictionary projects extended to the hundreds of volunteers, lists of words, counts of entries, etymology work, citations from published sources, and general philological methods used by the editors of the era.
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There was a dramatic wall of vastnumbers of slips, or ‘zettel’, hanging from long nails.
The Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel, Germany is the home of some of the work of Grimm Brothers work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch which features a large wall of zettel or slips hanging from long nails.
The slips hanging on nails sounds similar to Thomas Harrison's 1740's wooden cabinet of hanging slips used for excerpts and isn't far off from the organizational structure used by the subsequent Oxford English Dictionary's pigeonhole system of organization for their slip collection.
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Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm were also lexicographerswho created and edited the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent ofthe OED. Or rather I should say, the OED is the English equivalent of theDeutsches Wörterbuch, because the German dictionary was started first (evenif it ended up being finished later because the Brothers Grimm died beforethe letter G, and it took another hundred years to complete).
The Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB) was begun in 1838 by brothers Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.
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absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had tobe sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within alarger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising himnot to include the word condom. ‘I am writing on a very obscene subject.There is an article called Cundum ... a contrivance used by fornicators, tosave themselves from a well-deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoycopulation without the possibility of impregnation’, he wrote to Murray.‘Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair wasnamed after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.’ But he hadfound a quotation from 1705 referring to a ‘Quondam’ which made himrethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. ‘I supposeCundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary’, heconcluded. Murray left it out.
Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but
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By the time that section of the letter C was published for the OxfordEnglish Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt-, a cross-reference to the prefixes cont-, count- with no mention whatsoever of thefemale body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had beenin use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they wouldhave to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however,include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for ‘that of which one ought tobe ashamed’, which he defined as ‘the privy parts, the external genital organs’with no reference to a woman or – God forbid – her vulva.
1970s!
the shame attached to pudendum has lasted culturally for a terrifically long time in the West.
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a fellowlexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, hadhis own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with WilliamHenley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing theletters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took hispublisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jurythat writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personallyguilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs.Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Actby arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, notthe public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henleywas published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck andmany other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and thepublic outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.
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He had helped Murray with the very firstentry in the Dictionary – A: not only the sound A, ‘the low-back-wide vowelformed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips’, but also themusical sense of A, ‘the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major’, and finallythe algebraic sense of A, ‘as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used toexpress known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown’. Ellis washappy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, includingthe words air, alert, algebra.
He here is A. J. Ellis
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a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’
original source?
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the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr whosent Dr Murray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill who sent in 151,982slips over twenty-two years; third place to Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield ofDevon, with 70,277 over twenty-eight years; with Dr William Chester Minorof Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720slips.
Top slip contributors to OED: 1. Thomas Austin Jnr. 165,061 slips over 10 years (45.22 notes per day) 2. William Douglas 151,982 over 22 years (18.92 notes per day) 3. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield 70,277 over 28 years (1.98 notes per day) 4. William Chester Minor 62,720 slips over 23 years (to 1906) (7.5 notes per day)
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Over the seven years that archaeologist-to-be Margaret Murray sent in wordsto the Dictionary, she managed to contribute 5,000 slips.
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tensof thousands of books
Tens of thousands of books were used to draw the quotations used in the OED.
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The box in the archives held two further address books belonging toMurray, and the following summer, in a box in the Bodleian Library, I foundanother three address books belonging to the Editor who had preceded him,Frederick Furnivall. As I worked my way through them, it became clear thatthere were thousands of contributors. Some three thousand, to be exact.
Sarah Ogilvie found a total of three address books from Dr. Murray as well as three address books from Frederick Furnivall which contained details about the three thousand or so contributors to the OED.
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He had written the names and addresses of not just hundreds butthousands of people who had volunteered to contribute to the Dictionary.Finding Dr Murray’s address book
James Murray kept an address book with the names, addresses, and notations about the thousands of people who had volunteered contributions for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also included were the lists of material they read, the level of their contributions in number of slips and dates sent, as well as various personal details including relationships, marriages, and deaths.
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It was a treasure trove.
Curious that she doesn't use "thesaurus" here!!
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He devised a systemof storage for all the slips in shelves of pigeonholes that lined the walls of theScriptorium.
The scriptorium for the OED relied on shelves of pigeonholes into which the slips could be sorted and stored.
There are photos of Murray with these pigeonholes stuffed behind him. Dig one of these up.
This pigeonhole practice is in marked difference to other projects like the TLL which relied on boxes on shelves.
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urray’s house at 78 Banbury Road to receive post (it is still there today).This is now one of the most gentrified areas of Oxford, full of large three-storey, redbrick, Victorian houses, but the houses were brand new whenMurray lived there and considered quite far out of town.
Considered outside of Oxford at the time, Dr. Murray fashioned the Scriptorium at his house at 78 Banbury Road. Murray received so much mail that the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box just to handle the volume.
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Readers received a list of twelve instructions on how to select a word,which included, ‘Give the date of your book (if you can), author, title (short).Give an exact reference, such as seems to you to be the best to enable anyoneto verify your quotations. Make a quotation for every word that strikes you asrare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.’
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A 4 x 6-inch ‘slip’ sent in by one of the most prolific femalecontributors, Edith Thompson of Bath, who sent in 13,259slips. The underlinings and markings were made by Dr Murray.
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In addition tobeing Readers, volunteers could help as Subeditors who received bundles ofslips for pre-sorting (chronologically and into senses of meaning
The slips for the OED were sorted alphabetically and then grouped chronologically and by sense of meanings of the words.
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The volunteer ‘Readers’ were instructed to write out the words andsentences on small 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper, known as ‘slips’.
Volunteer 'Readers' for the Oxford English Dictionary were encouraged to write down interesting headwords along with their appearances in-situ along with the associated bibliographical information. The recommended paper size was 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper which were commonly called 'slips'.
(Double check this against the historical requests from James Murray.)
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Monday had been a walk around the deer park within the walls ofMagdalen College. C. S. Lewis had said that the circular path was the perfectlength for any problem. It was true.
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Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2023. https://amzn.to/3Un0sv9.
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- Spelin
- company towns
- card index for dictionaries
- Chris Collier
- Katharine Bradley
- Pythagoras
- want to visit
- Thomas Hewitt Key
- James Murray
- organizational methods
- William Henley
- NIMBY
- Continental philology
- Sunday Tramps
- zettelkasten planning
- 1858
- Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
- philanthropists
- address books
- Sarah Ogilvie
- organization
- human induced climate change
- chronological order
- linguistic prosody
- poetry
- psychiatry
- libraries
- philology
- Karl Marx
- alphabetical order
- contronyms
- obsessions
- retorts
- Henry Spencer Ashbee
- 4 x 6" index cards
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Oxford English Dictionary statistics
- Francis March
- fuck
- Women's National Indian Association
- typewriter affordances
- specialists
- Choctaw
- Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal
- Wilhelm Grimm
- Brisbane Australia
- digitized examples
- Volapük
- William Lees
- shifts in meaning
- John Knox
- heart
- Auguste Comte
- George Meredith
- historical linguistics
- reading practices
- public schools
- Edith Cooper
- slang
- Elizabeth Cadbury
- Flatland
- Carl A. F. Mahn
- William Levitt
- Indian Rights Association
- 1889
- co-educational
- tramps
- sexual exploits
- law
- Thomas Austin Jnr
- condoms
- analogies
- cunt
- scriptorium
- forfeiture
- counterfeit currency
- bible translation
- gloryhole
- 1864
- etymology
- Lingvo Internacia
- Pasilingua
- William Chester Minor
- Cyrus Byington
- Dictionnaire de la langue française
- fraud detection
- 1857
- loanwords
- Pythagoreans
- Jane Austen
- 1914
- mechanics
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- crowdsourcing
- sex
- Alexander Beazeley
- William Dwight Whitney
- greenbacks
- Slang and Its Analogues
- giving up
- forgery
- sense memory
- Indigenous languages
- Michael Field
- read
- slips
- nick names
- desiderata
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Edward H. Knight
- Edwin Guest
Annotators
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eljardindegestalt.com eljardindegestalt.com
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How to make time for your Zettelkasten<br /> by Fernando Nóbel
meh, nothing new/insightfu....
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er.educause.edu er.educause.edu
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Reclaiming Resilience: Building Better Systems of Care<br /> by Stephanie Moore
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capacities.io capacities.io
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'm contemplating buying some nails to make a Brothers Grimm-esque zettelwand to arrange my next piece. Forget Post-It Notes! Chris Rock eat your heart out. (h/t Thomas Harrison, 1740s)
#OldSchool #analog #FTW
see also: https://hyp.is/lczNTMazEe6bU_fwliPccg/www.grimmwelt.de/en/exhibitions/grimmwelt
Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1am3fz2/a_zettelwand/
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www.grimmwelt.de www.grimmwelt.de
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www.alamy.com www.alamy.com
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Almay Stock image of the zettel nailed to the wall of the Grimmwelt Museum.
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/186286893621
2024-02-06 Remington Rand 60 drawer modular card catalog offered for sale at $2,500 with local pick up only in Laurel, DE.
7 pieces: table/base; writing drawer with 2 pull outs, top, and 4 sections of 5x3 drawers.
Condition: Generally pretty good. Missing manufacturer plackard, Missing 15 rods. Some finish/paint peeling on the top.
Cost per drawer: $41.66
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/116060316468
2024-02-06 Gaylord Bros. modular 3 piece card catalog with 15 drawers (5x3), table, and top offered for bidding at $500 with a buy it now of $2,000. Local pick up only from Franklin Square, NY.
In pretty dreadful condition, mismatched drawers, wood and metal with plastic trays in drawers instead of wood. Heavy water damage to stain/finish on the top.
Cost per drawer: - minimum auction price of $500: $33.33 - buy it now price of $2,000: $133.33
I suspect this won't sell for quite a while at this price and in this condition.
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qnnnp.substack.com qnnnp.substack.com
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https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-eb5
quick overview article of Luhmann research sources on his zettelkasten, nothing new to me here.
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qnnnp.substack.com qnnnp.substack.com
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Die Zettelkastenmethode. Kontrolliere dein Wissen
by Andrey Sukhovskii (transliteration) aka Sukhovskii https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/024#%C2%A7%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8-%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85-%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%85
A fairly solid overview of lots of note taking texts, including some historical. Nothing new to me. Almost looks like he's collected everything I've mentioned in the past several years online. Originally written in Russian.
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www.indiamart.com www.indiamart.com
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https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/library-catalogue-cards-23374811530.html
IndiaMart.com still selling 3x5" library catalog cards predrilled. Listing for 1,200 R for 1000 cards.
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www.libraryhistorybuff.org www.libraryhistorybuff.org
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sample catalog card included in a Gaylord Brothers supply catalog.
Gaylord Bros. sold several types of card catalog cards including:
- No. 301 medium weight
- No. 306 with red rules (classical three lines)
- No. 307 with blue rules
- No. 311 pain card
all were predrilled with holes
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www.thelibrarystore.com www.thelibrarystore.com
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https://www.thelibrarystore.com/ The Library Store
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www.gaylord.com www.gaylord.com
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The current incarnation of Gaylord Bros.
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www.vernonlibrarysupplies.com www.vernonlibrarysupplies.com
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https://www.vernonlibrarysupplies.com/
Vernon Library Supplies
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www.demco.com www.demco.com
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https://www.demco.com/demco-reg-permalife-catalog-cards
The old school Library of Congress card catalog cards with the red ruling.
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www.blyberg.net www.blyberg.net
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www.ihearofsherlock.com www.ihearofsherlock.com
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forum.the-big-bang-theory.com forum.the-big-bang-theory.com
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library card catalog featured in Leonard's apartment
https://forum.the-big-bang-theory.com/topic/357-card-catalog/
Likely just decoration, but did Leonard or Sheldon ever interact with the card catalog in their apartment? A zettelkasten perhaps?
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www.facebook.com www.facebook.com
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https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/899978637990824/
Steelcase 8 drawer (x 2 rows per drawer) card index offered for $450 in downtown Los Angeles area in late December 2023. Looks to be in good condition with some nice art deco detailing.
Antique two tone card file with 8 drawers. Extremely rare in excellent condition. Detailed handles and opener latch with beautiful metal work. These typically sell for $1400 or more so it is priced to sell. Possible delivey depnding on your location. 52" height x 15" across x 28" deep
Most likely for 4x6" index cards, but messaged owner to check
Cost per drawer: $28.12
Likely capacity: 57,000 cards
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www.campion.ox.ac.uk www.campion.ox.ac.uk
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Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.
What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...
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quoteinvestigator.com quoteinvestigator.com
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A variation of this quote also appears in the movie Sweet Home Alabama (Touchstone Pictures, 2002) in the lightning sequence at the waterfront at the end of the picture:
What is it about you Southern Girls? You can't make the right decision until you tried all the wrong ones.<br /> —Jake Perry, portrayed by Josh Lucas
Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/EoLQ5MLkEe6lqTcB_otgdw a quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill.
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Abba Eban who was an Israeli politician and diplomat. In March 1967 Eban visited Japan, and the New York Times reported on a remark that he made:[1] 1967 March 19, New York Times, “Japan Welcomes Eban Warmly; Her Industry Impresses Israeli” by Robert Trumbull, Page 14, New York. (ProQuest) Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”
Potential origin of a phrase often misattributed to Winston Churchill in a slightly different form.
Later in June 1967 Eban commented similarly:
...nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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As King put it: "Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else."
Apparently this quote about America is misattributed to Winston Churchill
Several, including Richard Langsworth, editor of the journal Finest Hour published by WinstonChurchill.org, have been unable to attribute this quote to him.
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Nigel Rees, the host of the long-running BBC quiz show Quote ... Unquote, found so many examples of this oratorical identity theft that he coined a phrase for it: Churchillian Drift.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Owners Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley donated their publishing company Angel City Press to the Los Angeles Public Library in 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/la-public-library-book-publisher.html
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