Browse Items (18 total)

To accompany its big book, Merriam issued this four-page brochure with redline call-outs to illustrate all the elements of its typographically complex pages. One wonders how many dictionary users heeded the admonition to “read this carefully before…

This advertisement proclaimed: “Over 155,000 sets of The Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia & Atlas have been sold . . . . These volumes . . . are consulted A MILLION TIMES A DAY!” Purchasers were admitted to an institution of higher learning: “The…

William Torrey Harris’s successor as chief editor of Merriam’s flagship dictionary was William Allan Neilson, a Scottish poetry expert and Shakespeare scholar who, in 1917, became president of Smith College. In 1924, he accepted an invitation to…

Twain’s letter bears a connection to one of his lesser-known short stories, “Paris Notes”: “When the minister gets up to preach, he finds his house full of devout foreigners, each ready and waiting, with his little book in his hand—a morocco-bound…

In later editions of his dictionary, Bellows noted that nom de guerre means “pseudonym: fictitious.” Then: “Nom de plume is rarely used in French.” So he capitalized on Twain’s letter, even if the “pious aspect” comment of the Twain letter dissuaded…

If you’re drawn to both pseudonyms and Gallicisms, how do you know whether you use a nom de plume or a nom de guerre? If you’re Mark Twain, you ask the author of a French–English dictionary who inquired whether you’d like to have his book: “I shall…