The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)
Earlier in the year I read (and enjoyed) the novels The Dictionary of Lost Words & The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams which were all about the creation of the first OED and book publishing at the Oxford University Press so I leapt at the chance to read more about the people behind the story.
In idle moments (mostly when cataloguing my own book collection) I had thought how hard it must be to write a formal dictionary - and indeed Black Adder has a whole episode dedicated to the process - but it had never occurred to me that it was in fact an enormous crowd sourced project that is still ongoing!
Obviously over more than 150 years there have been 1000s of contributors to the OED and reading about them all would be overwhelming but Ogilvie has cleverly created 26 chapters all dedicated to different groups of people working on the project. L is for lunatic for example and there are some incredible stories of people working on the project from asylums...
In picking a thematic approach Ogilvie manages to paint a full picture of all the types of people working on the project as well as those trying to wrestle the mammoth undertaking into a publishable format. It was really nice to see how egalitarian the project itself was, even if the celebrations by the 'good and the great' when it was published weren't...
I loved dipping in and out of this book during my tea breaks - each chapter was just the right length and contained just the right amount of information to enjoy in a limited gulp - I'm sure there must be a work for that...
Many thanks to the publisher for granting me access to an advance copy via NetGalley
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