The Definitive Version

Posted on by David Gelber

Teatime at the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1980s resembled a scene from a Barbara Pym novel. It was taken in the ground-floor room of a grand Georgian building in St Giles’, Oxford, in which millions of slips sent in by volunteer readers filled large grey filing cabinets. In every other office […]

The Eleventh’s Hour

Posted on by David Gelber

The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is unquestionably an impressive thing. Even the India paper printing – the one I am happy to possess – demands an impressive five feet of bookshelf space to accommodate its forty-four million words in twenty-nine volumes. And sheer size is not its only attribute. First published over a […]

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