The Springfield Musket joke dictionary

Reference books today do not discuss Madeline but in time I think they will. She sees the world in a unique way.

I asked Madeline for her perspective on a few items she values. They aren't necessarily valuable but they are all, in some way, important to her.

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Selecting a few items from my library...

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Selecting a few items from my library that interest me specially is difficult; I must be almost arbitrary in choosing the items. So I'll just begin--with the two books that are cornerstones of the collection.

The first is Captain Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, London 1796, the third edition. I was young, not so long out of college, and I was looking for any original edition of the octavo book (1785, 1788, or 1796). I came across my first copy, a small folio bound in full black- and gilt-ruled brown morocco, with raised bands, extra-illustrated and inlaid. The volume contains many manuscript additions to the text and has a wealth of visual material (including newspaper clippings!) showing the contemporary culture in full bloom. This volume was put together and bound in the late Victorian era, by a person whose identity still remains a mystery to me. The Classical Dictionary was the most prominent dictionary of English slang to date, influential for decades to come, into the latter half of the 1800s.

The other cornerstone book is a thin small octavo published in wrappers in 1935, Allen Walker Read's Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary. Read gave the work a precise but academic-sounding title to help get the book past the censors. No one in America or Germany agreed to publish the book, but Read found a printer at the Obelisk Press in Paris a year after the press had published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The printer (here named Lecram-Servant) produced a small edition of 75 copies, none for sale, and each was signed, numbered, and presented by Read to a colleague.

I'm proud to have the author's own copy, and others. To make it plain: the book was an alphabetical study of the "bad" words found in graffiti on the walls of men's rooms in national parks. This legendary book has distinct appeals, to the very scholarly and the very bawdy. The work is available in reprint under the title Classical American Graffiti, from Maledicta Press. I was fortunate to know Allen Walker Read personally, a distinguished scholar who was a gentleman of the "old school." He was a mentor to me for many years, as he was to many lexicographers.

Some other items are noted more briefly: There is a slender 8vo.Yiddish-Russian dictionary by S. Lifshits published in Zitomir, Ukraine, in 1876, this copy from the library of the well-known Yiddishist Uriel Weinreich, bearing both his stamp and his signature in Yiddish. The book is a rebinding in cloth-backed paper over boards, retaining the original printed blue wrappers.

Another is a 16mo. pamphlet titled Eddie Ketcham's Primer, in printed blue wrappers written and published by George Crowell Ketchum in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1875. The preface states: "To/ my little brother/ four years old./ Now you can say your letters and can spell Ox and Cat and Dog and Hen, I will make you a little book, with pictures in it, and print it all nice to please/ you. Be a good boy and love Papa/ and Mama, and/ Your Brother,/ George." Not recorded in OCLC, the pamphlet must have been published in an edition of only a very few copies.