Book Preservation Michael Hancher Spring 2021
Michael Hancher has been hard at work on the preservation of books including dictionaries, as can be seen from his following text:
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33963/
There's a link there to the MLA session description (which included remarks by Lisa Berglund, about the distinctive features of annotated dictionaries):
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Session/8967
The prospectus for the session is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/121xheSfF63MuZYnxQRQMp_QNzB3ahbRE/view
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:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112051214614&view=1up&seq=34&q1=dictionaries
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)...