The Dictionary of Lost Words -- and lost printing technology

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Esmé Nicoll's widowed father was an assistant to James Murray, the editor of the first Oxford Dictionary, and because her mother was dead, she accompanied her father to the Scriptorium, the shed in the Murrays' garden, where the work of compiling the dictionary was carried on. While they sorted the slips of paper with the entries, many sent in by volunteers, five-year-old Esmé sat quietly under the table, noting the shoes and socks worn by the editorial assistants.

One day one of the slips falls from the table, and when no one bends down to retrieve it, Esmé puts it in her pocket, and later hides it away in an old trunk belonging to Lizzie Lester, the Murrays' housemaid, who is only a few years older than Esmé herself. So Esmé becomes a collector of lost words, words that are discarded from the dictionary, words that are lost inadvertently, and a few that she pilfers from the sorting table. When her pilfering ways are discovered, she is banished for a while from the Scriptorium, but her interest in words continues and as she grows older she begins collect them on her own account.

She also becomes aware that the all-male lexicographers are not aware of, or not interested in words that are used only by women, or words that are spoken by the common people rather than by the educated classes, and so becomes aware of social inequalities in late-Victorian and Edwardian England.

The Dictionary of Lost Words is only semi-fictional. Not for Pip Williams the usual disclaimer that none of the characters bear any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead. James Murray and most of the other editorial assistants, including members of Murray's family, are the real people, and they appear in a photograph at the end of the book. Of course their conversations are imagined, but some of the things they say are taken from their own writings, or contemporary reports and memoranda. One can learn quite a lot of the way in which the Oxford Dictionary was compiled from the book.

I really enjoyed reading it, not just because, having worked as a proof reader and editor at various times, I have an interest in words and how they are used, but also because Esmé and the other characters, fictional or otherwise, come across as real people, so that one shares their joys and sorrows, and cares about what happens to them.

The book also sparked lots of memories for me, which don't belong in a GoodReads review, as they go beyond the merits of the book itself, but I'll share some of them here. 

Esmé visits the Bodleian Library, and the Oxford University Press, where she becomes friendly with one of the compositors, and describes the work of the compositor in setting up the page for printing. And that recalled to me my time as a proof reader on the Windhoek Advertiser in the early 1970s, which was the end of the hot-metal type printing era.

When I began working as a proof reader I sat at a table in the works near the typesetters, who were mostly German-speaking, and worked on Intertype machines which set each line of type in hot lead. The lines were collected in "galleys", and once they had finished the story they would bring me a galley proof, which I would correct, not merely as a proof reader, following copy, but also as a line editor, checking for errors of fact, grammar and spelling. These would go back to the typesetters, who would set the corrections, often with much swearing.

The galleys would then go to the sub-editor and the compositor, who fitted them into the page, sometimes shortening the story to fit, and added the headlines. Once the page was set up, the page proof would come back to me for final corrections -- the most common mistake being transposed or missing lines. Then paper maché clichés or stereotypes would be made from the set page, from which the moulded lead plates would be made for the rotary press. All this was a much longer process than the book printing described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, where the compositor appears to have done the typesetting as well.

While I was at the Windhoek Advertiser however, electronic typesetting was introduced. A typist in the newsroom would type the story on a machine that produced a punched paper tape, which was then fed into an attachment on the Intertype machines, and the skilled typesetters became mere machine minders. They fed the paper tape into the machine and watched it work. The only time they touched the keyboard was to set the corrections.

Then I moved to Durban, and my wife Val had a cousin who married a compositor on The Daily News. He had just completed a five-year apprenticeship, and was almost immediately made redundant when the newspaper switched from hot-metal printing to offset litho. The job of compositor, as described in The Dictionary of Lost Words, had ceased to exist.

I read an article in the same Daily News about the journalist's experience with the new Atex computerised typesetting system. The journalist would compose the article on the machine, polishing and correcting it as it went. The sub-editor would read it on the same machine, edit, cut it and write the headline, and it would then go to the people who did page makeup, all marked by codes on the same machine. I wanted one. That was in about 1974, fifty years ago. I dreamed of having a machine that could store whatever text I wrote, and could correct and change without retyping.

Twelve years later I got my wish. I went to work in the Editorial Department of the University of South Africa in 1986, editing academic texts on their Atex system. It was not as exciting as I thought it would be, though, because by then I already had an Osborne portable (well, luggable) microcomputer and could use the Wordstar word processor. The Atex system was clunky by comparison. If you wanted to save a document you were working on, you could walk to the canteen and have a cup of coffee and a chat while waiting for it to return to the screen.

The following year, however, we got microcomputers, where the Atex system had been ported in a new word processing program called XyWrite, which was much faster, and, for sheer word-processing power, has still not been surpassed 35 years later. It may lack the bells and whistles of the latest word processors, but still has more pistons and cylinders, and the whole thing fitted on a 360K floppy disk.

All these memories, and many others, came back while reading The Dictionary of Lost Words. I thought the book was very good indeed, but perhaps that's just me, because of my experience with words and meanings and putting them into books. But I still think it's worth five stars.

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