Simon Winchester writes the most compelling history. I’ve
just listened to two books he produced out of one research project – The Professor and the Madman; The Meaning of Everything
Both books are about the making of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) and they are not his latest work. Sounds dull? I devoured the stories. What is compelling about crusty scholarly
hermits, mostly male, all old, beavering away on A-is-for Alphabet? It’s their back
stories, the depth of detail, the curious, eccentric, unbelievable intimacies
of the tale. No character is without complexity.
The archival work
Winchester undertook would have been mammoth because the OED took decades to
evolve and produced millions of scraps of paper from thousands of collaborators
throughout the world. The making of the OED was a long,
laborious project that produced something like 15 discrete volumes of the OED –
most of us have the little blue version that we had to buy for High School
(back in the day…) One of the big problems for the original editors was whether
the dictionary would ever make enough money to justify the £40,000 invested in
it. Today I’m sure the Oxford University Press is doing nicely - it’s available online by subscription, and
there are many specialist dictionaries, some of which I own, and others that I
covet.
The reason I listened to these books is because I have
always liked the way Winchester tells history, and I am confident he has
millions more readers than the average academic who plods through every dense
sentence providing references and attributions and citations ad nauseam.
Certainly fiction writers depend on our research for the historical accuracy of
their stories, but Winchester captures the spirit of fiction in his facts.
