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.
“A number of these dictionaries and grammars exist in only three or four copies in the world,” observes Rutgers professor Jack Lynch, a fellow Grolierite and co-curator of the exhibition. Take Noah Webster; Garner has “a couple of copies of the 1828 dictionary.” But then there are the “unique items,” such as the copyright certificates for Webster’s 1806 dictionary, not to mention a leaf from Webster’s handwritten manuscript.
Still, this was not the first American dictionary. That was published in 1798 by a Connecticut schoolteacher named Samuel Johnson Jr. (no relation to the renowned British lexicographer). His simple, 200-page volume covered barely 4,100 words, with concise entries suitable for students. Genuine: “not counterfeit.” Geography: “knowledge of the earth.” Gherkin: “a pickled cucumber.”
By contrast, Samuel Johnson the elder might best be described as a lexicographic omnivore. Although nearly two dozen real English-language dictionaries preceded his, they were considered inferior to those being prepared by scholars at the Académie Française and the Florentine Accademia della Crusca.
“A group of booksellers and publishers approached Johnson, and he agreed that he would do something on the scale of these academy dictionaries by himself in just a few years, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t produce something that is as long as the first seven English dictionaries put together, with a greater degree of authority,” Lynch says.
Johnson accomplished this herculean feat in 3 years, versus the 40 it took the “immortals” of the Académie. And his dictionary would remain authoritative for more than a century, at least until James Murray and his Oxford English Dictionary came along.
Both Johnson’s and Murray’s dictionaries are on display in the Grolier exhibit. Conspicuously absent is what has long been considered the oldest dictionary of English: Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, from 1604. Only a single copy still exists, at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Back in the summer of 2021, Garner and Lynch embarked on a campaign to bring this last surviving Cawdrey to America. It had never left England, but then there had never been an exhibit like this one.
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 he owns in all, but they are his true passion.
Godine agreed to fund the $25,000 cost to bring it to Grolier. The Cawdrey would be hand-carried from London to New York by a Bodleian librarian. “It would never actually be touched by anybody but Bodleian personnel, so the Bodleian librarian would place it on the cradle and in consultation with Jack and me pick the page to be opened and displayed,” Garner explains.
Negotiations began over the number of lumens in the light bulbs, the relative humidity of the room, 24-hour security. But then, a wrinkle: there would be food and drink in the gallery for the gala launch of the exhibit. “These are state-of-the-art cases,” Garner says. “No one is going to be putting a drink down on top of it. You could take a fire hose of permanent ink and direct it at these cases. Nothing’s getting through. But the Bodleian said, ‘Sorry we’re inflexible on this. Crumbs lead to insects, insects lead to mice.’”
In the end, though, the Cawdrey just might be dethroned. As Garner and Lynch discovered, John Rastell—an Oxford-educated lawyer; brother-in-law to Sir Thomas More, lord high chancellor of England, later beatified as a saint; a seeker of the fabled Northwest Passage to China; a playwright and set designer for King Henry VIII—had produced some 30 books before finally retiring in 1533. One of these, it turns out, was likely the very first dictionary in English.
Expositiones Terminorum Legum Angliae, marginally better known as Les Termes de la Ley, went through at least 29 editions. It was the first, printed in 1523, that launched its author—who died in prison for failing to pay his tithes to the Church of England—to immortality. Garner owns 12 of these Rastell editions, including the 1579 and 1592, which will be displayed—both pre-dating the Bodleian’s 1604 Cawdrey, present here only in facsimile.
The exhibition includes a number of other 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,” as a member of the O.E.D. staff and compiler of the authoritative A Middle English Vocabulary, with 6,800 “exceedingly fastidious definitions.” Then there are CD-ROMs and selections from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
Yet the heyday of the dictionary has likely passed. “Dictionaries at once reflected and shaped people’s relationship with their language,” Garner and Lynch conclude, while asking, “How did the population move from a state of frenzied interest to a state of widespread unconcern in such a relatively brief time?”
How indeed? The need for looking up words may not have evaporated; classical lexicography may have simply given way to the pressures of time in an ever accelerating world. But perhaps some interest may be rekindled now at the Grolier and its remembrance of things past.
“Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography” is on at the Grolier Club, in New York, from May 2 to July 27
David A. Andelman is the author of several books, including A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen. You can read his Substack here
