I pulled out what looked ugly but turned out to be a gem — what sort of gem, I admit I don’t know, but that element of surprise, even confusion, is what unpacking the Kripke Collection is all about. It’s a small book with a shabby paper cover, stained and rubbed. Was it forgotten or was it used so much, perhaps with dirty fingers, that shabbiness was inevitable? And is it really a dictionary, or for that matter even a book? Whatever it is, it has an accordion format: the first page of the accordion is pasted to the front cover; pages don’t turn, but unfold until the end, pasted to the back cover, though it’s unpasted now, for whatever reason. There are twenty “pages” or folds in the book’s entirety. The pages are linen paper, but the paper is all of a piece, so it’s difficult to determine whether the book was made from a sheet pasted and folded to create a book — a nursery or classroom project, a governess-designed object of instruction — or whether the book was published in an accordion format. Note: there is no publishing information of any kind anywhere on the book, which rather favors the nursery genesis.
Opening to any spread in the accordion, you’ll find a dozen “entries,” each a combination of a delicately colored picture of an item, accompanied by a French word corresponding to the picture and an English translation of the French word.
Here’s a list of what one discovers on the first page spread:
Un Perroquet ‘Parrot’
Un Cornichon ‘Girkin
La Chatte ‘Cat’
Un Croix ‘Cross’
Le Bouton ‘Button’
Un Rasoir ‘Razor’
Un Cossin ‘Cushion’
Une Talle ‘Trunk’
Le Soufflet ‘Bellows”
Le Cantaloup ‘Melon’
La Bobine ‘Bobbin’
Le Bougecir ‘Night Candlestick’
In other words, the book comprises basic vocabulary meant for the instruction of children, and since the captions present the French first and include articles, it’s almost certainly an aid to Anglophone children learning to speak or read French.
So, it’s an aid, but is it a book? Well, it’s text and pictures between two covers, even if it has neither front nor backmatter, page numbers, title page, or other apparatus. Were the sheet with the words and pictures still flat and unbound, we probably wouldn’t call it a dictionary — does it become a dictionary when folded into an accordion and pasted to covers? And when was this book- or dictionary-making done? The drawings and their coloring suggest the late-eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and I venture that the spelling girkin suggests the same period, because dictionaries and corpora indicate that gherkin had become the standard spelling by the 1830s. The item is unaccompanied by evidence of provenance, not even an invoice from whoever sold it to Madeline. A bookseller marked it at “650 –” which might mean 650 francs (a large sum for such a worn and unofficial book) or 650 dollars, in which case we might doubt Madeline’s judgment. I had hoped that, given the price, I’d find a seller’s or auction catalogue including the item, but I have not. If you have some insight into this mysterious item, please, tell us what you know or think — comment on this post or write to me at adamsmp [at] @iu.edu.
Pictorial dictionaries have a long history, and dictionaries have included pictures for a long time, too. Pictures appear in English dictionaries as soon as there are dictionaries to be illustrated, in the sixteenth century. (If the subject interests you, you might want to consult Michael Hancher’s chapter, “Illustrating Dictionaries,” in the Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary, which should be available in digital format about the time this post appears and in print in September of this year.) Bilingual and pedagogical dictionaries have been around just as long, and although not all examples of them include pictures, they include them increasingly over time. And accordion formats for books originated more than a millennium ago. That is to say, the dingy little book Madeline collected doesn’t break ground in any of these book historical and lexicographical categories, which makes us even more interested in why Madeline would buy it at such a price.
I have a theory. I’ve learned some things about Madeline’s motives for collecting from items I’ve pulled from, oh, so many boxes. There are beautifully bound copies of canonically important dictionaries; little dictionaries that use information about words to market things that have nothing to do with language per se; dictionaries of slang and niche vocabularies; books about the languages caught in the lexicographers’ webs of words; works by her friends and acquaintances — she collected for a lot of reasons, I suspect many more than I’ve encountered, so many more than I can record here or even in a stream of posts over years. She also had a fascination for idiosyncratic works, one offs and dictionaries compiled by everyday people, not just by official lexicographers.
And that may explain her acquisition of this odd book, this odd dictionary: it wasn’t manufactured; clearly, someone made it. We can’t really know why or by whom: a teacher, governess, or parent; a child assigned a French project to make a French–English dictionary or a bookmaking/craft project for which a sheet of pictures and words provided material; or perhaps it was a jeu d’esprit — someone had seen an accordion book and decided to see how it worked by making one. We can’t know, and from the lack of accompanying documentation I assume Madeline couldn’t know, either. The mystery was the fascination.
This little book wasn’t by Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster or any other lexicographer whose name you know. It was constructed by the Unknown Lexicographer, who didn’t actually do any of the lexicography but was a private publisher of at least one dictionary. As we know, Anonymous is very often a woman in a period hostile to women’s authorship. Madeline might have thought 650 dollars a reasonable price to celebrate this Anonymous and, by extension, all women who dared lexicography.
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