Michael Hancher has been hard at work on the preservation of books including dictionaries, as can be seen from his following text:
There’s a link there to the MLA session description (which included remarks by Lisa Berglund, about the distinctive features of annotated dictionaries):
The prospectus for the session is here:
William Frederick Poole, sometime president of the American Library Association and the American Historical Association, was librarian of the Newberry Library in Chicago when he inveighed in 1893 against a new vogue to discard old books from libraries, citing neglected dictionaries as an example:
I document that vogue (the so-called “Quincy plan” — which actually makes sense for community libraries, though not research libraries), though not this particular passage, on pp. 13-18 of the bibliography. Dictionaries have not been much singled out in the age-old debate about the necessity and hazards of weeding books, but they are liable to the same fate as old encyclopedias and textbooks. “Dr. Winsor” (Justin Winsor, Harvard’s librarian) apparently came up empty-handed when Poole asked him about seeing the first Latin textbook used at Harvard College.