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Oxford English Dictionary asks public to help track down mystery book
much more at Guardian link aboveThe Oxford English Dictionary is appealing to the public for help after being unable to trace a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.
Meanderings of Memory, by one "Nightlark", is dated to 1852 by the OED, and appears in 51 entries for the dictionary, including "couchward", "extemporize" and "fringy". Veronica Hurst, the OED's principal bibliographer, said its shadowy existence was discovered when a member of staff was working on the entry for "revirginize", for which Meanderings of Memory is the earliest citation.
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The book could not be traced in any library catalogue or database, so Hurst was contacted; she expected to track the book down within 10 minutes.
"That turned into half an hour, and I was no further along the line to solving it – I looked on Google Books, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in short I looked everywhere I could think of and couldn't come up with anything," said Hurst. "We're not usually completely floored, but this time we're stumped."
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So staff decided to ask the public for help. "It really has captured people's imaginations," said Hurst. "One theory is that it could be pornographic, or in some ways a clandestine publication that didn't get recorded in the normal way … I certainly did incline to the hoax theory – people have made quite a lot of effort from time to time to get into the OED, so maybe a 19th-century Oxford man thought he could fool us."
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But a member of the public has since found another mention of Meanderings of Memory, in a Sotheby's catalogue from 1854, and Hurst is now leaning towards the hypothesis that the book could actually be a very small piece of work, possibly poetry, running to just five to 10 pages.
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"Some of it sounds ethereal and scholarly poetic, and then suddenly you're down to the ground with an entry like 'lump' – 'I the mattress spread, And equal lay whatever lumps the bed'. Some of them are just a bit funny," she said.
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