The professor and the madman : a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary

Available (4)

Location	Collection	Call #
Avalon Public Library	Nonfiction	423 WINC
Location	Avalon Public Library
Collection	Nonfiction
Call Number	423 WINC
Brentwood Library	Nonfiction	423 Winchester
Location	Brentwood Library
Collection	Nonfiction
Call Number	423 Winchester
Northland Public Library	Nonfiction	423.092 W72
Location	Northland Public Library
Collection	Nonfiction
Call Number	423.092 W72
Robinson Library	Non-Fiction	423 WINCHEST
Location	Robinson Library
Collection	Non-Fiction
Call Number	423 WINCHEST

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Summary

Published Reviews

Booklist Review: "Distinguished journalist Winchester tells a marvelous, true story that few readers will have heard about. His narrative is based on official government files locked away for more than a century. As everyone knows, the Oxford English Dictionary is an essential library reference tool. The 12-volume OED took more than 70 years to produce, and one of its most distinguishing features is the copious quotations from published works to illustrate every shade of word usage. By the late 1890s the huge project was nearly half done, and the editor at the time, Professor James Murray, felt the need to meet and personally thank Dr. William Minor, with whom he had been in lengthy contact and who had contributed a lion's share of the quotations. As it turned out, Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who many years before had been found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity but had been incarcerated in an English asylum ever since. The tale of their affiliation and friendship reads like a creatively conceived novel. --Brad Hooper"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor‘all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'être, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word "art" and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his cheeky way with a tale ("It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy" he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task. Photos not seen by PW. Agent, Peter Matson. BOMC selection. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved"
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Additional Information

Subjects	Murray, James A. H. -- (James Augustus Henry), -- 1837-1915 -- Friends and associates. Minor, William Chester. Oxford English dictionary. New English dictionary on historical principles. Psychiatric hospital patients -- Great Britain -- Biography. Encyclopedias and dictionaries -- History and criticism. Lexicographers -- Great Britain -- Biography. English language -- Lexicography. English language -- Etymology. United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Veterans -- Biography.
Publisher	New York :HarperPerennial,1999
Edition	First Harperperennial edition.
Language	English
Description	xiii, 242 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Bibliography Notes	Includes bibliographical references (pages [239]-242).
ISBN	006099486X 9780060839789 0060839783
Other	Classic View