All good things, we’re told, come to an end, and exhibitions in libraries are notably ephemeral. “The Whole World in a Book,” an exhibition from Madeline Kripke’s (literally) amazing collection of dictionaries, which we opened on February 20 and closed towards the end of July, only proves the rule. But briefly, it made a difference. We don’t know how many visitors ambled through the exhibition, but I can attest that whenever I walked in or out — and I’m in the building frequently — folks were looking at the Kripke cases in the main gallery, learning something about the books and the worlds they represent. A word book is necessarily a culture book.
Some who stopped among the dictionaries were on their way to the contiguous Declaration of Independence exhibition or coming from it. Others came for the Jerry Slocum Collection of Mechanical Puzzles but found the Kripke collection by happy accident. Well, that’s the way library exhibitions work — seeing and learning are matters of being in the right place at the right time.
On July 10, however, members of the National Puzzlers League, in Bloomington for their annual convention, toured the Kripke exhibition with Docents of the Day, Ben Zimmer and Brianne Hughes, two visiting puzzlers who also just happen to be serious lexicographers. Since our goal was to bring Madeline Kripke’s word-hoard to the attention of anyone and everyone, both dedicated and accidental visitors were welcome.
For dedicated dictionary-lovers, we hosted a symposium focused on dictionary collections and collecting dictionaries, on February 20–21. The speakers included Stefan Fatsis, whose most recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary tells the story of Kripke’s collection and the Lilly Library’s acquisition of it, among many other dictionary things. Jonathon Green, the world’s foremost slang lexicographer delivered “Ex Libris: Some Thoughts on Slang and Its Collecting in Honor of and Memory of Madeline Kripke,” while Jack Lynch, Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, author of (among many other books) The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English from Shakespeare to South Park, covered “Everything Under the Sun, and Over It: Collecting Dictionaries.”
Green and Lynch were followed by Lindsay Rose Russell, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, and author of Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography spoke about “The Queer Art of Collecting”; Rob-Rulon-Miller, proprietor of Rulon-Miller Books, Saint Paul, Minnesota, spoke from vast experience, general and specific, about “Madeline Kripke: Bookseller”; Elena Wicker, an analyst at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is author of a forthcoming book about US military dictionaries but also prize-winning collector of them, engaged “Uniform Language: On Collecting and Researching Military Dictionaries”; and Volker Harm, chief editor of Wortgeschichte digital and, for nearly a quarter of a century, senior editor of the revision of the Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, surprised us with “Richard Wagner as a Dictionary Collector and Dictionary User.”
The events were well attended. The Q & A event with Stefan Fatsis was attended by at least seventy-eight people, while the Saturday papers were heard by at least forty-three — attendance that day was difficult to track, as some could not attend the whole program, leaving early or coming late. To our surprise and delight, not all participants were local: folks traveled from as far away as Texas!
Anyone interested who couldn’t attend the exhibition in person can at least look through the exhibition text at the exhibition web page. It’s not the same as seeing the books opened and on display, but we hope it will satisfy a lexophile’s curiosity to some extent. In May 2026, revised versions of the papers will be published in a special issue of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, so that those with access to the journal, at least, will have access to the symposium.
Events like “The Whole World in a Book” require teams of specialists: in this case, the team included a dictionary scholar (me), a curator (Executive Associate Director of the Lilly Library, Erika Dowell), an exhibit designer (Jenny Mack), a graphic designer (David Orr), an events specialist (Lindsay Schaeffer), a communications specialist (Assistant Dean of Engagement, Strategic Partnerships, and Communication, Michelle Crowe), an archivist (Kyra Triebold), and cataloguing librarians (Marcia Corner, Alisa Hilt, and Emily Sanders).
We should also applaud Joel Silver, Director of the Lilly Library, who negotiated the purchase of the Kripke Collection, and Carolyn Walters, the Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at the time, who reviewed and approved the acquisition plan. Add those pleasant and helpful staff who sat at the library entry and monitored the galleries (too many to name). A confession: we stole our title — piracy figures in the lexicographical tradition, after all — from Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran’s The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century.
David Orr designed postcards and flyers and programs and banners; he also designed enamel pins with the same visage of Madeline Kripke incorporated into publicity, various buttons (another form of pin, really), and a sticker that riffs on one of our favorite items, the pink, plastic-covered, pocket-sized book with “Dig This Dictionary!” across the top of the cover, once featured on this blog.
Pins and stickers are the very definition of ephemera. I hope that, decades from now, someone will find that sticker at the back of a drawer. Throw it out or look into it? Well, it’s interesting, so at least the beholder will look at it. But if they look into it, they’ll discover that their grandparents once visited an exhibition of dictionaries titled “The Whole World in a Book,” celebrating a collector named Madeline Kripke. Finding a lost item in a drawer represents one person’s memory but someone else’s discovery. Discovery is the very point of an exhibition. The exhibition is over, but how wonderful it will be if, having found a pin or sticker, the finder discovers the Kripke Collection.
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