RHHDAS

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 11:57 AM 6/10/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>At 10:08 AM -0400 6/10/03, Joanne M. Despres wrote:
>>I forwarded Larry's question (hope that was okay, Larry)
>
>Sure.  The (now O)ED is a wonderful precedent.  I was just curious
>about this, and with the help of your SHARP colleagues you've nicely
>allayed my curiosity.
>
>larry
>


But isn't it the case that the Philological Society generated the prospectus
(Trench wrote it, late 1850s) and then gathered citational slips without
publishing any fascicles at all? Two decades after the original prospectus
the editor of what we call the OED, Murray, ended up complaining about the
sloppiness of the slips that had been gathered before his time and to some
extent had to start afresh.

So the case of the New English Dictionary (later, the OED) is not the case
of a multi-volume publication where some installments were published by one
firm and the rest later on by another firm. The original query was:

>Speaking of which, can
>anyone think of other cases off the tops of their respective heads in
>which the first m volumes of a multi-volume work were published by
>one publisher and the final n volumes by another?


Anyway, this is my off-the-top-of-the-head recollection of the early history
of the NED. (I published an article that touched on some of Trench's
language-related work, so I read whatever was fairly readily available some
years ago. Memory not guaranteed to be 100% accurate at this point!)

Regards, GD




Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu