Light reading

A chance find in a second-hand bookshop has recently delighted us all with what is clearly an account, based on inside knowledge, of the early days of the OED. The novel The Scholar's Daughter by Beatrice Harraden, published in 1906, is a romantic tale about a young girl whose father is the editor of a large dictionary. The humorous descriptions of his staff (the 'bookworms') and of their procedures leave little doubt that that this is a picture of the OED in the making.

References to slips, obsolete spellings, and variant forms abound, and who but one well-acquainted with lexicography could invent the device of delaying the editor's appearance at a crucial point of the plot by distracting him with the entry for aroynt?! We wonder whether our own endeavours will make such entertaining reading in the next century...