The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  They were the discarded letterpress printing plates from which the Oxford English Dictionary had been made. The original lead-fronted, steel-and-antimony-backed plates, cast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from which all the many printings of the OED—from the individual fascicles made as the books were being edited, to the final twelve-volume masterpiece of 1928—had been made.

  The press, my friend explained, had recently adopted more modern methods: computer typesetting, photolithography, and the like. The old ways of the letterpress men—with their slugs of lead and their typesticks, their em-quads and their brasses and coppers, their tympan paper and their platen brushes and their uncanny ability to read backward and upside down at speed—were at long last being abandoned. The plates, and all the job-cases of type for hand-setting, were now being tossed away, melted down, carried off.

  Would I perhaps like one or two of the plates, he asked me—just to keep as souvenirs of something that had once been rather marvelous?

  I chose three of them, reading the backward type as best I could in the dim and dusty light. Two of them I later gave away. But I kept one: It was the complete page 452 of the great dictionary’s volume 5: It encompassed the words humoral to humour, it had been edited in 1901 or so, and set in type in 1902.

  For years I took the strange, dirty-looking old plate around with me. It was a kind of talisman. I would squirrel it away in cupboards in the various flats and houses in the various cities and villages in which I came to live. I was rather proud of it—boringly so, I dare say—and every so often I would find it hidden behind other, more important things, and I would bring it out, blow off the dust, and show it off to friends, a small and fascinating item of lexicographic history.

  I am sure at first they thought I was a little mad—though in truth I fancy they seemed after a while to understand my odd affection for the blackened—and so heavy!—little thing. I would watch as they rubbed their fingers gently over its raised lead, and nod in mute agreement: The plate seemed to offer them some kind of tactile pleasure, as well as a simpler intellectual amusement.

  When I came to live in the United States in the midnineties, I met a letterpress printer, a woman who lived in western Massachusetts. I told her about the plate, and she became visibly excited. She had a great enthusiasm for the story of the making of the dictionary, she said, as well as a tremendous fondness for its design—for the elegant and clever mix of typography and font sizes the stern old Victorian editors had employed. She asked to see my plate, and when I brought it to her, she asked if she might borrow it for a while.

  That while turned into two long years, during which time she took on as much other work as a hand printer gets these days. She embarked on a series of broadsides for John Updike, made chapbooks for a couple of other New England poets, published a collection or two of short stories and plays, all of which she had printed on handmade paper. She was very much the craftswoman, all her work meticulous, slow, perfect. And she kept my dictionary plate standing on a windowsill all the while, wondering what best to do with it.

  Finally she decided. She knew that I had a great liking for China and had lived there for many years; and that I was also fonder of Oxford than any other English city. So she took down the plate; washed it carefully in a range of solvents to purge it of its accumulated dust, grease, and ink; mounted it on her Vandercook proof printer; and carefully pressed, on the finest handwoven paper, two editions of the page—one inked in Oxford blue, the other in China red.

  She then mounted the three items side by side—the metal plate in the middle, the red page to the left, the other, blue page to the right—and set them inside a slender gold frame behind nonreflecting glass. She left the completed picture, with wire and bracket for hanging it on the wall, in a small café in her hometown, and then wrote a postcard telling me to pick it up whenever I could, and at the same time to take care to enjoy the café owner’s strawberry-rhubarb pie and her cappuccino. There was no bill, and I have never seen the printer since.

  But the plate and its proof sheets hang on my wall still, above a small lamp that illuminates an open volume of the great dictionary on the desk below. It is volume 5, and I keep it open to the same page that was once printed from the actual piece of metal that hangs suspended just above it. It is what Victorians would have called a grand conjunction, and it serves as a small shrine to the pleasures of bookmaking and printing, and to the joy of words.

  Once my mother noticed that the dominant entry on the plate and the sheets and in the book below is the word humorist. It reminded her of a nicely droll coincidence, another conjunction, though one rather less grand. Humorist had been the name of a horse that ran in the Derby on June 1, 1921, the day my mother was born. Her father, so pleased at the news of the birth of a baby girl, had put ten guineas on the filly, rank outsider though she was. But she won, and a grandfather I never met made a thousand guineas, all because of a word that briefly took his fancy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgment (); also acknowledgement (a spelling more in accordance with Eng. values of letters). [f. ACKNOWLEDGE v. + -MENT. An early instance of -ment added to an orig. Eng. vb.]

  1. The act of acknowledging, confessing, admitting, or owning; confession, avowal.

  5. The owning of a gift or benefit received, or of a message; grateful, courteous, or due recognition.

  6. Hence, The sensible sign, whereby anything received is acknowledged; something given or done in return for a favour or message, or a formal communication that we have received it.

  1739 T. SHERIDAN Persius Ded. 3, I dedicate to you this Edition and Translation of Persius, as an Acknowledgment for the great Pleasure you gave me. 1802 MAR. EDGEWORTH Moral T. (1816) I. xvi. 133 To offer him some acknowledgment for his obliging conduct. 1881 Daily Tel. Dec. 27 The painter had to appear and bow his acknowledgments. Mod. Take this as a small acknowledgement of my gratitude.

  When I first came upon this story, which was mentioned all too briefly, and just as an aside, in a rather sober book about the dictionary-making craft, it struck me immediately as a tale well worth investigating and perhaps telling in full. But for several months I was alone in thinking so. I had in the works a truly massive project about an altogether different subject, and the advice from virtually all sides was that I should press on with that and leave this amusing little saga well alone.

  But four people did find it just as fascinating as I did—and saw also the possibilities that by telling the poignant and human tale of William Minor, I could perhaps create some kind of prism through which to view the greater and even more fascinating story of the history of English lexicography. These four people were Bill Hamilton, my longtime friend and London agent; Anya Waddington, my editor at Viking, also in London; Larry Ashmead, Executive Editor of HarperCollins in New York; and Marisa Milanese, then an editorial assistant in the offices of Condé Nast Traveler magazine, also in New York. Their faith in this otherwise unregarded project was total and unremitting, and I thank them for it unreservedly.

  Marisa, whom I think a paragon of ceaseless enthusiasm, dogged initiative, and untiring zeal, then went on to help me with the American end of the research: Together with my close friend of a quarter century, Juliet Walker in London, she helped me spin my basic ideas into a complex web of facts and figures, which I have since attempted to settle into some kind of coherent order. The extent to which I have succeeded or failed in this I cannot yet judge, but I should say here that these two women presented me with a bottomless well of information, and if I have misinterpreted, misread, misheard, or miswritten any of it, then those mistakes are my responsibility, and mine alone. My thanks also to Sue Llewellyn, who, as well as copyediting this book so assiduously and with such good humor, also—she reminded me—had worked on my book on Korea ten years before.

  Access to Broadmoor Special Hospital, and to the voluminous files that have long been kept on all patients, was clearly going to be the key to cracking this story; an
d it took some weeks before Juliet Walker and I were allowed in. That we were was a triumph for two Broadmoor employees, Paul Robertson and Alison Webster, who made a persuasive case on our behalf to a perhaps understandably reluctant hospital administration. Without the help of these two remarkable and kind individuals, this book would never have managed to be much more than a collection of conjectures: The Broadmoor files were needed to provide the facts, and Paul and Alison provided the files.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, matters proceeded rather differently—despite the best efforts of the splendid Marisa. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., is no longer a federal institution but is run by the government of the District of Columbia—a government that has experienced some well-publicized troubles in recent years. And at first, perhaps because of this, the hospital refused point-blank to release any of its files, and went so far as to suggest, quite seriously, that I engage a lawyer and sue in order to obtain them.

  However, some while later, a cursory search I made one day of the National Archives pages on the World Wide Web suggested to me that the papers relating to Doctor Minor—who had been a patient at St. Elizabeth’s between 1910 and 1919, when the institution was undeniably under federal jurisdiction—might well actually be in federal custody, and not within the Kafkaesque embrace of the District. And indeed, as it turned out, they were. A couple of requests through the Internet, a happy conversation with the extremely helpful archivist Bill Breach, and suddenly more than seven hundred pages of case notes and other fascinating miscellanea arrived in a FedEx package. It was more than gratifying to be able to telephone St. Elizabeth’s the next day and tell the unhelpful officials there which file I then had sitting before me on my desk. They were not best pleased.

  The Oxford University Press was, by contrast, wonderfully helpful; and while I am naturally happy to thank the officials at the press who so kindly sanctioned my visits to Walton Street, I wish to acknowledge the very considerable debt that I owe first to Elizabeth Knowles, now of Oxford’s Reference Books Department, who had made a study of Minor some years before and was happy to share her knowledge and access with me. I am delighted also to be able to thank the irrepressibly enthusiastic Jenny McMorris of the press archives, who knows Minor and his remarkable legacy more intimately than anyone else anywhere. Jenny, together with her former colleague Peter Foden, proved a tower of strength during my visits and long after: I only hope that she manages to find an outlet for her own fascination with the great Dr. Henry Fowler, whom she rightly regards, along with Murray, as one of the true heroes of the English language.

  Several friends, as well as a number of specialists who had a professional interest in parts of the story, were kind enough to read the manuscript’s early drafts, and they made many suggestions for improving it. In almost all cases I have accepted their proposals with gratitude, but if on occasion I did, through carelessness or pigheadedness, disregard their warnings or demands, then the same caveat—about the responsibility for all errors of fact, judgment, or taste remaining firmly with me—applies as well: They did their best.

  Among those personal friends I wish to thank are Graham Boynton, Pepper Evans, Rob Howard, Jesse Sheidlower, Nancy Stump, Paula Szuchman, and Gully Wells. And to the otherwise anonymous Anthony S——, who grumbled to me that his fiancée had denied him romantic favors one summer morning because she was bent on finishing chapter 9, my apologies, embarrassed thanks for your forbearance, and best wishes for future marital bliss.

  James W. Campbell of the New Haven Historical Society gave great assistance in finding the Minor family in their old hometown; the librarians and staff at the Yale Divinity Library told me much about William Minor’s early life in Ceylon. Pat Higgins, an Englishwoman living in Washington State, and with whom I corresponded only by e-mail, became fascinated also by the Ceylon and Seattle ends of the Minor family story and gave me several fascinating tips.

  Michael Musick of the U.S. National Archives then found most of Minor’s military files, and Michael Rhode of the Walter Reed Army Hospital tracked down his handwritten autopsy reports. The National Park Service was helpful in giving me access to military bases in New York and Florida where he had been stationed; the Index Project in Arlington, Va., assisted me in finding additional records relating to his wartime career.

  Susan Pakies of Virginia’s Orange County Tourist Office, along with the immensely knowledgeable Frank Walker, then took me around all of the important sites where the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought, and later, to cheer us all up, to several of the delightful old inns that are hidden away in this spectacularly lovely corner of the United States. Jonathan O’Neal patiently explained Civil War medical practice at the old Exchange Hotel-cum-hospital that is now a museum in Gordonville, Va.

  Nancy Whitmore of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and painstakingly dug up a huge amount of highly relevant arcana. Dr. Lawrence Kohl at the University of Alabama was kind enough to take time both to discuss the mechanics of Civil War branding and to speculate (in an impressively informed way) on the effects such punishment might have had on Irishmen who fought in the Union Army—the latter his particular specialty as a historian of the period. Mitchell Redman of New York City filled in some details of Minor’s later personal life, about which he had once written a short but so far unproduced play.

  Gordon Claridge of Magdalen College, Oxford, had much that was helpful to say about the origins of mental illness; Jonathan Andrews, a historian of Broadmoor, helped also; and Isa Samad, a distinguished psychiatrist of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told me a great deal about the history of the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.

  Dale Fiore, superintendent of the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, then added fascinating footnotes about the end of William Minor’s life—the length of the coffin, the depth at which it is buried, and the names of those who surround him in his plot.

  Life became a great deal easier once I had tracked down one of the few known living relatives of William Minor, Mr. John Minor, of Riverside, Conn. He was kindness itself, giving me an enormous amount of useful information about the great-great-uncle he never knew, and offering me access to the treasure trove of pictures and papers that had sat for years, undisturbed, in a wooden box in his attic. He and his Danish wife, Birgit, became as fascinated by the story as I was, and I thank them for pleasant waterside dinners and time spent talking about the nature of their most curious relative.

  David Merritt of the Merritt International Family History Society [sic] in London gave me valuable help in ferreting out details of where George Merrett’s descendants might be: I eventually found one, a Mr. Dean Blanchard in Sussex, who was equally interested in the fortunes of his distant family, and shared much that was valuable with me.

  I am indebted also to my American agent, Peter Matson; his colleague Jennifer Hengen; and to Agnes Krup, who, once enthused by the strange nature of this story, became among its keenest supporters and kept me going, writing hard, during a long hot American summer. My wife, Catherine, saw to it that I remained undisturbed, and offered generously the kind of serenity and sanctuary that the writing of a yarn like this more than amply deserves.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  The book that first inspired me to look into this story was Jonathon Green’s Chasing the Sun (Jonathan Cape, London, and Henry Holt, New York, 1996), which devoted a page and a half to the tale, and led me, via its bibliography, to the rather more celebrated work about the making of the OED, Caught in the Web of Words (Oxford and Yale University Presses, 1977), written by the great editor’s granddaughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray. In both cases the tale of the first meeting between Murray and Minor relies on the well-known myth; but it was not until Elizabeth Knowles wrote a more accurate account in the quarterly journal Dictionaries that some of the truth of the encounter became more properly known. Both of the books will delight the enthusiast; the journal tends toward
the academic, but since—at least superficially—the disciplines of lexicography are frankly not too taxing, many may profit from looking at it as well.

  For those interested in the basic principles behind the making of word books, Sidney Landau’s definitive Dictionaries—The Art and Craft of Lexicography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1984) is an essential read. For those iconoclasts wishing to understand the flaws in the OED, John Willinsky explains much in his rather ill-tempered Empire of Words—The Reign of the OED (Princeton University Press, 1994), which offers a politically correct revisionist view of James Murray’s creation—albeit from a somewhat admiring stance. It is worth reading, even if just to make one’s blood boil.

  Copies of Doctor Johnson’s Dictionary can usually still be found quite easily—reproductions of the large-format two-volume editions have been produced on presses in such unlikely settings as the city of Beirut, from where I recently purchased a copy for $250. It is difficult to find a good first edition for under $15,000. But there is a witty and useful distillation, with words selected by E. L. McAdam and George Milne (Pantheon, New York, 1963; paperback reprint, Cassell, London, 1995).