https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/biggest-dictionary-collection
"Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of
Webster’s Collegiate that
her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s.
By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of
dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan
apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this
chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their
usage.
“We don’t really know how many books it is,” says Michael Adams, a
lexicographer and chair of the English department at Indiana University
Bloomington. More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke
documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two
tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly
2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of
the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open
each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700.
“And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty
good estimate.”
It will take years to fully process a collection of that size, but Adams just
can’t wait. So he’s unpacking Kripke’s trove and sharing it online, the same
way the [woman] he considers a friend built it, one book at a time. “I go into
the room where all of the boxes are and I open up a box and pull something
out,” Adams says. He might find a rare and valuable Latin dictionary from 1502,
or some edition of
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (the collection might have
every printing of every edition)—but that’s not really what he’s hunting for.
He’s looking for treasures like Kripke’s “slang wall.”
“This is my favorite wall,” Madeline Kripke told
Narratively reporter Daniel
Kreiger when he visited her West Village apartment in 2013. She shined a
flashlight on glass-fronted shelves jammed with dictionaries full of the
slanguage and cryptolect of small and likely overlooked communities. Kreiger
listed some of the groups represented at that time, among them cowboys and
flappers, mariners and gamblers, soldiers, circus workers, and thieves."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
