2,000 Books and Subtracting

75 Boxes of Books, 7 of Personal papers, 2 Tubes of Oversized Materials, and 1 Large Envelope of Oversized Materials Ready for a Trip to the University at Albany (29 December 2011)

While preparing this year's donation to the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University at Albany, my largest ever, I stayed up the entire night to finish my preparations. Even after starting months ahead of time and spending all my free time working on completing the cataloging of these books and the foldering of my papers, I found myself pressed for time. By the time my day was done, I had been away for 32 hours. Starting at about 3:30 that afternoon, I slept for the next fourteen. Among what I gave away were many books I never thought I could ever part with: Noah Webster's Compendious Dictionary from 1803, the first dictionary he ever published; Contributions towards a Glossary of the Glynne Language, both editions of this first-ever book of family words, the first released in 1855 in an edition of 50; Ambrose Bierce's Cynic's Word Book, the precursor to the publication of the Devil's Dictionary, this book goes only through the letter L; a full-leather copy of a high school printing project from the 1940s that included bits of papyrus tipped in; and so many more rare and wonderful and sometimes expensive books.

We are often surprised by the things we give up, which end up being those we must give away. My house was so full of books that I couldn't find the ones I owned. At least 60 boxes of books were piled away in closets and under the eaves. They hardly existed. Many of these were always out in plain view, and I would examine them occasionally and marvel at their existence. I spent years collecting these books, often to the great detriment of the family finances, and I did it to define a world for myself, one constructed of words. The books I collected stretched back to the mid-1700s, and the latest book in the collection is dated 2012 (which won't be here until tomorrow, but such are the habits of American publishers, of all publishers, for all I know).

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In my video documentation, I say there were 1825 books in the boxes, but the number was really 1925. However, I reviewed the thousands of entries in my database of books (AKA the Bookbase), and I discovered a number of books not properly marked as heading out of the house, so the real number of books ("titles" is a better term here) is over 2,000. A large number.

The core of this collection is dictionaries, primarily in English, but also in other languages, particularly French. But the collection has any kind of publication concerned with language: thesauri, grammars, style guides, monographs, books of essays. And there is a second, deeper core to the collection, something even stranger. In the collection, there are over 500 antidictionaries, which are dictionaries designed primarily to entertain than to instruct. Some are focused on redefining words in the language (such as the three dozen or so versions of Bierce's Devil's Dictionary within that collection), some invent and define neologisms, and some of them merely display strange or obsolete words for our entertainment (most famous among these probably being Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary). The variety of these (particularly in terms of quality) is huge, and I have these in a couple of other languages, including a good selection of antidictionaries in French.

Or had. I had.

Some of the Books in the Collection and My Jigsaw-Puzzle Method of Packing them in Boxes (29 Dec 2011)
Finding these books took both skill and luck, and there are still many more I want. Even now, I've been thinking of the books I need to acquire, of ways to expand the collection. There are big holes in the collection. I have Hotten's second and third edition of his Slang Dictionary, but not the first. I've never found a first edition of The Devil's Dictionary I would buy because it is usually found only in Bierce's multi-volume set of Collected Works, which was sold only as a set. I sometimes have the first volume in a two-volume set without the second, and I somehow allowed myself not to notice that the fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English has recently been released. I'll be particularly interested in that volume, since it will probably include citations from a dictionary of mine, just as the fourth volume did.

The Contents of Box 38 (29 Dec 2011)
In this collection, there are many volumes that cost quite a bit of money (and many more that cost almost nothing, but which accrue value by having been brought together), and Box 38 has the greatest concentration of such books. Not many books, but worth about US$5,000 in total. I didn't pay that much for them, though I did pay quite a bit for them. I have tended to live dangerously, at least financially. Still, even this box's books represent only a small percentage of the total value of these books, and I mean "value" in a couple of ways. What is important to me is not the dollar value of the books; what I care about is how these books demonstrate and examine the human engagement with language, how they define us as beasts of the word.

Wordbooks on the Left, Taking up Most of a Row of Shelving (29 Dec 2011)
Once I arrived at the University at Albany, I backed the truck up to the loading dock, and the five or so of us there unloaded this huge collection of books. The process was fairly quick, but tiring, since I'd spent the morning, with Nancy helping, moving 82 heavy boxes down three flights of stairs and into a truck. Once the boxes were moved into special collections, I helped load them on boxes, and then I was ready to go. I said goodbye, drove the truck back to the rental place, drove the car back to the house, made two other donations (one of about 200 books to the public library), and I kept working until I decided to lie down for a few minutes and didn't arise for fourteen hours.

In my dreams, I know there were words.

ecr. l'inf.