Bryan A. Garner began his love affair with the dictionary at age 15. “A girl told me with a smile and a twinkle in her eye, ‘Bryan, you have a really big vocabulary,’” he says. “We are still friends to this day, and she and her husband came over for my 61st birthday. They were admiring my library, and I said, ‘Well, Eloise, you know, you must share the credit for all this.’”
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.
