NEW YORK, NY.- Samuel Johnson, creator of the first great English dictionary, impishly mocked his own trade when he defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” On view in the Grolier Club’s ground floor gallery from May 2 through July 27, 2024, Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography features more than 100 objects, from early printed books to CD-ROMs, that tell stories of the people who struggled to corral and define the English vocabulary in all its dizzyingly diverse manifestations.

Cocurated by Grolier Club members Bryan A. Garner (Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University) and Jack Lynch (Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark)—both lexicographers and historians of dictionary-making—Hardly Harmless Drudgery includes manuscripts, documentary materials, engravings, photographs, busts, tokens, and stamps. An accompanying book, published by Godine, details how the dictionary evolved from manuscript to print to digital editions.

“Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and cultural battlefields. They’ve been announced with messianic fervor and decried as evidence of cultural collapse. They are works of almost superhuman endurance,” write Garner and Lynch. “As commodities in a fiercely competitive market, they’ve kept publishers afloat for generations. They’ve also sometimes sunk publishers. Many are beautiful objects, products of genuine innovation in typography and book design. This exhibition tells the story of English dictionaries and some of the geniuses, sciolists, plagiarists, and obsessives who’ve created them, from the late Middle Ages to the present—and beyond.”

Exhibition Highlights

Drawn mostly from Karolyne and Bryan A. Garner’s collection of dictionaries and lexicographic artifacts, Hardly Harmless Drudgery highlights important dictionaries and manuscripts from Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as portraits, advertisements, lexicographic ephemera, and letters.

Among the earliest objects on view are a 15th-century German dictionary leaf with civil-law entries relating to abortion and two law dictionaries printed in 1474 that are essentially “Gutenbergs” of the law. One of the law dictionaries, Vocabularius Juris Utriusque Iuris, is attributed to Jodocus of Erfurt, Germany, and went through more than 70 printed editions over the following 150 years. Also on view is John Minsheu’s A Dictionarie in Spanish and English (London: Edm. Bollifant, 1599), a bilingual dictionary made with the help of prisoners of war from the Spanish Armada. Minsheu presaged the experience of centuries of lexicographers in saying that it is “harde to please fewe, harder to please many, impossible to please all.”

A special highlight on view is a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s monumental two-volume Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Strahan for J. & P. Knapton et al., 1755), which marked a new epoch in lexicography and an achievement unlike anything that came before. With 43,000 headwords supported by 115,000 quotations from great writers, Johnson revealed subtle shades of meaning with numbered senses and an extensive treatment of phrasal verbs (take in, take off, take on, etc.).

Johnson’s work was “the” dictionary until Noah Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary came on the scene in the 19th century. Webster was known as the “Father of the American Dictionary.” His first lexicographic work, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (New Haven: Sidney’s Press, 1806), featured 40,000 definitions and championed American spellings. When Joseph Worcester was hired to abridge Webster’s monumental American Dictionary (New York: Sherman Converse, 1828) and then went on to write his own, Webster accused him of plagiarism and began a “dictionary war” that lasted three decades. On view in the exhibition is Webster’s own copy of an infuriating document: a copyright jointly held with his nemesis, Worcester.

A highlight on display is the first English dictionary by a woman: Ann Fisher’s An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language (London: Printed for the author and sold by Hawes et al., 1773. 2d ed.), of which no first editions are known to exist. This is apparently the only extant copy of the second edition. Also on view is an early copy of Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (London: Longman, Brown et al., 1852) inscribed to his son, who later became editor of the Thesaurus. After retiring as a physician, Roget divided the English language into a thousand categories, gathered into five groups: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, and Affections. An instant success, the book went through 25 printings during Roget’s lifetime. The exhibition also features letters to lexicographers from the dictionary aficionados Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, and E.B. White.

The exhibition culminates with lexicographic efforts that continued into the 20th and 21st centuries, including the first dictionary of Black English, Clarence Major’s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (New York: International Pubs., 1970); the first LGBT dictionary, Bruce Rodgers’ The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972); and A Feminist Dictionary by Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, with Ann Russo (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), which questioned the ideology behind ostensibly neutral and objective reference books, said to be “constructed almost entirely by men with male readers and users in mind.” Looking ahead to the future, the exhibition offers a preview of draft entries to be included in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s forthcoming Dictionary of African American English (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, projected for 2025).