Untitled Books

I met Christian Kay, one of the four co-editors, in Edinburgh recently. She began working on the project in the late 1960s, when she was 27, assisting Michael Samuels, then Professor of English Language at the University of Glasgow. The story of the project would make a book in itself. For ten years, the team transcribed information from the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary on to slips of paper. Then, calamitously, in the1970s, the building that housed the only copy of their work was gutted by fire. The slips of paper survived, however, having been stored in metal filing cabinets. After that, the notes were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations - eventually being transferred to microfilm and, in the end, onto a computer. The thesaurus was nearly finished in 1980, but the team couldn't let it go: deciding to include material from the updated versions of the OED - and, by doing so, adding almost thirty years to the task.

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The Wrecking Light is published by Picador.

Wednesday, 27 January, 2010

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