Look at What We’ve Unpacked! No, Really, Come to Bloomington to Look at It

Writing about Madeline Kripke’s rich and especially large collection of dictionaries one or two books at a time — the method of this blog — is quixotic enough, but the Lilly Library will go  one better next February and open an exhibit from that collection: ten cases in the north gallery devoted to books and materials from the Kripke Collection, and samples of still other dictionary collections held in the Lilly Library will be on display in the adjoining south gallery, and we’ll still barely skim the surface of the Kripke Collection or the Lilly’s holdings. (The Lilly holds, for instance, the Breon Mitchell Collection of Bilingual Dictionaries 1559–1998 and the Eric Partridge Papers). For lovers of dictionaries and the languages they record, this will be an enlightening event, a celebration of dictionaries and how they open windows onto human experience. (Madeline’s collection is primarily Anglophone, but not exclusively so, and, of course, Anglophone cultures are themselves many and diverse.)

The exhibit will open at the beginning of February, but we are also planning to celebrate Madeline and the collection later in the month, February 19–21, 2026. The celebration has several components:

• We will have a symposium about dictionary collections and collecting, with talks by Bryan A. Garner (Black’s Law Dictionary, Garner’s Modern American Usage, and a renowned collector), Lindsay Rose Russell (Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography), and others. When the symposium’s program is final, in late summer, we’ll publicize it — first here and then elsewhere (regular readers of Unpacking the Kripke Collection have favored status, you see).
• We would like to organize a conference of international scholars also devoted to dictionary collectors, collections, and collecting, to accompany the symposium.If you would like to present a 20-minute paper about a dictionary collector, a dictionary collection, or dictionary collecting (or some combination of the three) at this conference, please send a 300–500-word abstract to Michael Adams (adamsmp@iu.edu) by September 15, 2025. We will consider the abstracts immediately, send responses to the authors by October 1, 2025, which should give those whose papers are accepted ample time to arrange travel.
• Information about lodging and registration will be come later this fall. We expect to charge a nominal registration fee (that is, USD50, not USD200).
• You are welcome to attend for the fun of it! If you plan to attend without presenting a paper, just let Michael Adams (adamsmp@iu.edu) know and he’ll put you on the list of people who need conference information. All those attending — casual attendees as well as those presenting lectures or papers — will have access to all programs and events we schedule for February 19–21.
• We will host events about lexicography and language to an even wider audience, including a reading and interview with Stefan Fatsis, whose new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and threat to) the Modern Dictionary (Grove Atlantic), will be released on October 16, 2025 (Dictionary Day, for those who don’t know) — it includes a chapter about Madeline’s collection; and a discussion with Diana M. Jones, of Merriam-Webster, Inc., about becoming a lexicographer.

This is so exciting for those of us in Bloomington who want to share Madeline Kripke’s Collection of Historical Dictionaries with all and sundry. We hope you’ll join us. We think that, if you’re a dictionary person to any significant degree, you’ll want to attend.

Of course, not every interested person will be available or have the capacity for travel at the announced time. We will miss you at the February events, but the symposium and other articles about dictionary collections in North American libraries will be published as a special issue of the journal Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America (scheduled for May 2027), and there will be publishing opportunities for papers presented at a complementary conference, if one takes place. The exhibition will be available only to those who make their ways to Bloomington between February 2 and July 18, 2026.

For those who cannot join the Bloomington festivities, this blog will continue, though we cannot publish as many posts annually as when we started — our capacity is reduced, and there are other aspects of the overall Madeline Kripke Project that require attention, as you can see (and there is more to come — stay tuned). Unfortunately, we cannot plumb the collection’s depths in a blog or even an exhibition: we may be able to share as many as 150 items from the collection in the exhibition, plus the three dozen works featured in the blog posts so far, but obviously that barely represents the 20,000 items in the collection. We are going to be unpacking the Kripke collection, not to mention its significance, for a very long time. Next February’s exhibit will ensure, if you can join us, that you won’t have to wait forever to see everything.

P.S. Please circulate this call and share the blog with anyone you think might be interested in joining us next February.