Bryan A. Garner’s collection of some 4,100 English-language dictionaries—perhaps the largest such collection in private hands—is just a fraction of the 38,000 books the accomplished lexicographer owns in all, but they are his true passion. And now we will get to see 102 of the best when New York’s Grolier Club opens the exhibition “Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography,” with an accompanying book from Godine. The exhibition includes a number of remarkable volumes, from Bartlett to Roget to J. R. R. Tolkien, described by Garner and Lynch as “undoubtedly the most popular writer ever to have engaged in serious lexicography” (Tolkien was a member of the O.E.D. staff and compiler of the authoritative A Middle English Vocabulary, with 6,800 “exceedingly fastidious definitions”). There are also CD-ROMs and selections from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Though the heyday of the dictionary has likely passed, perhaps some interest may be rekindled at the Grolier and its remembrance of things past. —David A. Andelman