Harmless drudges

I was in Kilkenny's spanking new library filling in time before a visit to the dentist. It is, as all public libraries, richer in 400s "Language" than 500s "Science & Math". But I snagged (423.0922) The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023) by Sarah Ogilvie. And I was rewarded in the snagging - it's great. The famous post-box [L cropped under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from the work of Kaihsu Tai] outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford where James Murray and 3000 others built the OED. We only know about the 3000 [!] because, in her last week as an Oxford lexicographer, Ogilvie opened a random box in the archive to reveal James Murray's address book. "It was one of those moments when things go into slow motion": as well it might for an archivist to discover The Archive.She set out on an academic research project to track down and bring to life some of the ace, biased, crazy, dogged, eccentric contributors to the cause of…

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