Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
18th May 2018
I have long been interested in dictionaries, even before I completed my MA in Lexicography twenty years ago. One book we shall be exhibiting at the London Rare Book Fair next week is this: It’s a copy of the first edition of Trésor des origines et dictionnaire grammatical raisonné de la langue française (1819). Although […]
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17th March 2016
A friend on Facebook pointed out a recent piece on fake places that only exist to catch copycat mapmakers. ‘If a competitor just so happens to have the same fake town on their map, then you’ve pretty much caught them red-handed.’ It reminded me of something similar in a book I have: The Oxford-Duden Pictorial […]
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23rd February 2016
I’ve just realised that it’s been over month since I last posted. Where has the time gone? Things have been busy. First, a trip to Stuttgart (read about what things used to be like at a German book fair), then Pasadena, for the California Book Fair. Next week will see me in Edinburgh, and before […]
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16th October 2013
Ever since (in fact, probably long before) I completed my MA in Lexicography, I have been fascinated by dictionaries, none more so than The Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928), ‘the greatest treasure-house of any language in the world’ (PMM). The origins of the OED lie in these two papers, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, read by […]
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3rd September 2010
The Year 4338 (4338-i god in Russian), written by Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, is credited with containing the earliest description of blogging, in 1840. The first appearance in print of any part of the story was in the St Petersburg almanac Utrennaia zaria [“Daybreak”], but the whole thing wasn’t published until 1926. It’s a rare book. […]
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