Allen Walker Read, who has already appeared in our posts, was a close friend of Madeline Kripke. He lived in the dictionary world, as an Assistant Editor of the Dictionary of American English during the 1930s, as well as on the Dictionary of United States Army Terms during the Second World War. Later, he led the editorial board for the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition and served as pronunciation editor on the Golden Book Illustrated Dictionary for children. He was a longtime member of the Dictionary Society of North America, though not, like Madeline, one of the society’s founders. He served as its President and, this time like Madeline, was elected a Fellow of the society, its highest honor.
But that is only a small part of what he achieved. Among other things, he settled the origins of the greatest of all Americanisms, OK, in a series of articles published by the journal American Speech in the 1960s. He was among the first to write about the English of African Americans, as well as that of Indigenous peoples. He wrote about attitudes towards American English but couldn’t resist topics that many thought were marginal: the spelling bee, babytalk, family words, Pig Latin, etc. He also wrote an important scholarly article in American Speech on the F-word, titled “An Obscenity Symbol,” because in 1934, when it was published, the Comstock Act still prohibited distribution of obscene materials — it’s an article about the F-word in which the F-word never appears.
In 1928, Read and his family vacationed in the national parks and monuments along the western coast of North America. Required by nature to relieve himself, at least some of the time he had recourse to latrines. On the walls of those latrines, he read inscriptions that could serve as evidence of the forms and usage of what some would consider obscene words, words usually left out of dictionaries. Like all lexicographers, Read copied this evidence, and, like many linguists of the time, he thought such words, however much they offended however many people, demanded our attention — linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians all needed to study them — so he decided to prepare a little dictionary of the obscenities he encountered on that vacation. The quotations enabled defining and illustrated their use.
He couldn’t publish what he called Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy of Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element of the English Vocabulary in the US because of the Comstock Act, so he took the advice of the lexicographer and publisher Eric Partridge (who comes up occasionally in these posts) and applied to Jack Kahane, proprietor of the Obelisk Press in Paris, to publish the book at his own expense. In 1935, just seventy-five copies of the book were printed, after which Read had to smuggle them into the United States. Once they were safely ashore, Read worked to have the book reviewed and to distribute numbered copies to leading figures in the humanities and social sciences whose access and reference to it would gradually build its reputation — Lexical Evidence became a book famous for treating a taboo subject and even more famous for being unavailable.
Madeline managed to collect at least five copies of Lexical Evidence — that is, we’ve found five, but we might find more in unopened boxes. Those five include No. 1 (Read’s own copy); No. 2 (the copy Read gave to Jess Stein, later the lead editor of Random House dictionaries, a friend from his days at the Dictionary of American English, when Stein was a graduate student at the University of Chicago); No. 12 (the copy given to Gershon Legman, scholar of bawdy limericks and crusader against censorship); No. 21 (the copy belonging to J. Louis Kuethe, librarian at Johns Hopkins University and scholar of American English and American place-names); and No. 22 (the copy Read gave to H. L. Mencken, the fourth edition of whose The American Language was published in 1936 — Mencken cited Read’s scholarship, including Lexical Evidence, more than he cited the works of any other author). Each of these, given the author and the recipient, is doubly valuable, doubly worth collecting, and one can’t help but wonder whether Madeline thought she might eventually collect all seventy-five copies.
Such curation requires unwavering attention: privately held copies of Lexical Evidence rarely surface — besides one’s relationships with booksellers, one must keep an eye on the open market or miss an opportunity. I am not a collector, but I do have a special interest in Read’s works (books are in progress), and I was alerted to the auction of No. 26, which had belonged Percy W. Long, a very good person to receive one of Read’s treasured copies, since he had been an editor at the G. & C. Merriam Company; editor of Dialect Notes, the publication of the American Dialect Society; and, at the time he received his copy of Lexical Evidence, editor of PMLA, Secretary of the Modern Language Association, and a professor at New York University. He was, like Mencken and Stein in their respective corners of American learning, almost infinitely influential. I lost No. 26 at the last minute but was prepared to push the price above $1000 in my last bid. Very likely, had Madeline managed to collect all copies of Lexical Evidence, it would have cost her between $75,000 and $100,000.
In 1977, Reinhold Aman, editor and publisher of the journal Maledicta and Maledicta Books, re-issued Lexical Evidence as Classic American Graffiti, which was then reprinted in 1987 (the back cover says 1988), with a new preface by Read, finally making the book available to a broader audience — every serious student of English could own a copy. Now, though, copies of Classic American Graffiti sell for hundreds of dollars. Of course, Madeline collected a copy of the later printing, the copy Aman sent to Read on October 2, 1987, covered by the brown envelope in which it was sent.
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