The list was quite awesome: Most of the volumes were rare, and likely to be in the hands of only a very few collectors. Some books, on the other hand, were already available at Murray’s newly established dictionary library at Mill Hill: They could be sent to readers who promised to do work on them. (And vouched to return them: When Henry Furnivall had been editor he found that a number of disgruntled readers used the lending scheme as a means of swelling their own library collections, and neither sent in the requested quotation slips nor ever returned the books.)
