Crime Mss

[Jonathon Green]

In American Speech XVII:3 (Oct. 1942, pp 193-5) David Maurer reviewed a group of manuscripts edited/compiled by Joseph Blackwell, Jr., and Clinton Sanders:

They included: Words of the Racket, 4 vols. ms., 452 pp. (7,638 entries); Words of Trampdom, 1 vol. ms., 120 pp. (1,377 entries); Slang of Spangleland, 1 vol. ms., 106 pp. (2,033 entries); Cant of the Crafts, 1 vol. ms., 86 pp. (1,648 entries); Words of the Fighting Forces, 1 vol. ms., 97 pp (1,707 entries). .

I have checked the Library of Congress and NY Public Library catalogs: they are listed in neither. Nor does either author apear to have published anything else (there is a book by one Clifton R Sanders on Cultural Criminology, but its date, 1995, makes the earlier Sanders an unlikely author). Nor does a further compilation, Words of America, also mentioned by Maurer, appear to have gone beyond a title.

Would anyone know what became of these mss.? The odds are that Maurer gutted them for his own researches, so the terms may well not be lost (and may indeed be in other, published, dictionaries), but the originals would be of great interest.

Jonathon Green