A ton of weightless books

I topped the ton on a motorbike years ago on a stretch of the ruler-straight Roman road that crosses the Cotswolds Hills called the Fosse Way. I passed the ton in a flashy, silver Mazda car rocketing along one of the unbelievably unrestricted sections of a German autobahn. And just today I clocked the ton in the “Books Read” section of my Kindle. If you are not from the UK this might all seem very odd, but, colloquially, a ‘ton’ here simply means one hundred: a. hundred miles per hour or a hundred books or whatever

A hundred books would weigh about a hundredweight, i.e. about one hundred pounds in America, more in the UK and roughly fifty kilograms in Europe. A strong man can carry a hundredweight bag of cement under each arm. I can manage one with difficulty – in other works a ton of books is pretty heavy.

One estimate I’ve found reckons that you can make 20 to 30 books from a 10 inch (25 cms) thick tree so my one hundred books would have required the death of four trees if they were paper, plus all the energy involved in felling the trees and transforming the wood into pulp. In the Kindle my books weigh effectively nothing, and cost virtually nothing to produce. What’s more they only take up a quarter of the Kindle’s available storage – so plenty more reading yet.

Actually my Kindle, just like my offices in the past, is a mess. I do have a section for “Books Abandoned”. There are 37 currently lying, sad and rejected, in there. Then I have the equivalent of my desk top where books lie about in good order, but actual disarray. There are well over a hundred books there patiently awaiting the push of my finger. Some, like The Diary of Samuel Pepys, I’ve been nibbling away at for years. Others are samples that I have yet to look at, others are in some intermediate state where I cannot bring myself to abandon them, but probably should. Still others are simply forgotten or ignored like a volume that has slipped from sight at the back of the sofa.

How can I be so messy? Well all of those books hanging around on my desk top, and those that I’ve abandoned and read are in that quarter of storage that I’ve used so far, so I can afford to be a little lax. Besides no one else sees my mess.

Where do all these books come from? Almost all are from Amazon of course, but the problem there is finding books that you like at prices that you like.  Here’s where Book Bub comes in. Every day it send me an email with news of eBooks on special offer that I might like and so I have a queue of books that I have sampled or bought by this route adding to the mess on my desk top. And I love it. My greatest fear is to be without a book to read - no fear of that nowadays, the problem is to find the time to read them.

My one hundredth book was The Fictional Man by Al Ewing. It was interesting. The gimmick here is the production (not explained in any detail) of fictional characters in the flesh who then play their namesakes in TV series etc. Yeah, it’s an odd idea, but it allows the author to debunk racism and question our own versions of reality. Not surprisingly it introduces the touchy subject of sex between ‘fictionals’ and ‘real people’ and ends with the odd concept of ‘real people’ who want to be ‘fictionals’. Perhaps not so odd in fact.

An amusing launch of a very small book about a very large one

At an unusual book launch this week Peter Ashby, a local entrepreneur, read the definition of the word ‘Abbreviator’ from the first volume of a rather special book. It was an early copy of the Oxford English Dictionary which Peter had been given whilst transforming the dictionary into a compact version via microfiche. He had in turn generously given the many volume Dictionary to the nearby Frewen Club and had borrowed back the first volume for the evening.

The definition that he read from the Abbreviator entry was ‘An officer of the court of Rome, appointed...to draw up the Pope’s briefs’ possibly proving that the ardent compilers of the great Dictionary had a sense of humour – or a blind eye!

Rob Walters, local guide and author, in launching his new book on the history of the Dictionary explained that the great book took nearly seventy years to complete. It was issued in parts by the Oxford University Press which took over publication in 1879 and ‘Abbreviator’ appeared in the very first section to be issued covering A-Ant. This miniscule fraction of the Dictionary was released in 1884 when already five years into a ten year contract. With half the A’s and all of the rest of the letters to do the task seemed ‘mission impossible’.

It was James Murray, a self-educated Scotsman, who nursed, guided and cajoled the Dictionary through its many years of near extinction finally arriving at Volume 3 which took the struggle up to the end of the E’s. It was at this point that the tide turned and the whole country, the University and the Oxford University Press  put their backs behind this grand and entirely uneconomic project. Rob explained that Murray died working on the letter T in 1915 in the full knowledge that his great work would be completed. Robert Bullard, local author of the popular Business Writing Tips read from a job application letter written by Murray which demonstrated the man’s phenomenal knowledge of the languages of the world.

Rob explained that the Dictionary had its true beginnings in 1857, but was not completed until 1928 with the publication of the first edition. However, this was not the end. The voluntary readers who scanned the thousands of books for quotations on which the dictionary was based continued their work through the near seventy years of compilation and so there was a backlog of new words leading to a supplement issued in 1933. And this is the story of the Dictionary’s life – the work never ends as new words are added and old definitions updated. Fortunately updating is much easier nowadays and the third edition of the Dictionary exists entirely on the Internet.

The evening finished with a rousing rendition of the ‘The Dictionary Song” by local musician and composer, Peter Madams, lead singer of the much missed Oxford group Veda Park.

The book is entitled A Concise History of the Oxford English Dictionary and is available from the Visitor Information Centre, the Book House, and Amazon. The launch was held on 21^st March at the St Aldates’ Tavern, Oxford.

The story of the Oxford English Dictionary

I have a new book coming out. It is the shortest book that I have written so far and its subject is one of the largest books ever published. It’s all about the birth and development of a dictionary and the title is: A Concise History of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The actual launch is on March 21^st in Oxford, but the book is already available on Amazon as a paper and an eBook. Here’s the link via my bookshop where you can find more details and a sample.

The idea for the book emerged from a tour. Last year I began planning a new Oxford guided walk based on the history of the Dictionary and became so fascinated by the story that I decided to write about it. Of course there are already plenty of books on the subject so why write another? Simple – they are all four course dinners and mine is just a snack. So, just as the concise version of the Dictionary reduces twenty hefty volumes of the second edition to one handy book, my book compresses the story of its development into a slim volume that you can read in an hour or two.

To some the topic might seem rather dry. It is not. What enlivens it is the characters involved and the doggedness shown in continuing with the work over so many years when all seemed doomed. Many of those characters were unpaid volunteers who valiantly sought sources for the many thousands of words that are defined in the Dictionary, making its creation comparable to Wikipedia by post.

I hope that my book will satisfy most people, but if you prefer the four course dinner then there is a comprehensive history coming out later in the year from Oxford University Press. It will cost £40 whereas my little snack costs just £3.99 in paper and £2.99 as an eBook: tasty and cheap, complete with pictures of the main characters involved.