Madeline Kripke kept 20,000 volumes in a Manhattan apartment: dictionaries, shoe store giveaways, and a king's copy of a 17th-century word book. #ThatWordChat guest Michael Adams talks about her collection and what is still being found inside. Watch: bit.ly/ThatWordVideo #Dictionaries #WordNerds

What's next for Adams? A limited-series podcast about Madeline Kripke: Dictionary people talking about what it was like to be in her apartment. "A wild ride, to say the least." #ThatWordChat

He never made the trip. He hasn't found it in the collection yet, but every time he goes into an inventory box — he's still looking! #ThatWordChat

Kripke kept emailing him: "When are you coming to New York? I have something I think you'd really want to see. I don't think I'm willing to sell it but you'd really want to see it." #ThatWordChat

The King and Queen weren't accepting gifts on the trip. So the press reframed it as "the sort of book any gentleman would want in his library." They accepted and received a specially bound and plated copy of all four volumes. #ThatWordChat

In 1939, the marketing director at the University of Chicago Press had an idea: give King George VI and Queen Elizabeth a copy when they visited the United States. #ThatWordChat

Adams: "She absolutely was a scholar. She was part of the community of lexicography." She was a founding member of the Dictionary Society of North America in the mid-1970s. She attended every meeting until 2019, when she was too infirm to make the trip to Bloomington. #ThatWordChat

Adams: "It had never occurred to me how much time and care it would take to put together a collection like this, volume by volume." #ThatWordChat

Adams on what working with the collection taught him: For rare book fairs, festivals, sales, you have to be there in person. You can do some of it online, but it's risky. #ThatWordChat

Kripke managed to collect the copy that had been owned by King James I of England — James VI of Scotland. How do they know? Adams was examining the cover and noticed, alongside a coat of arms, the emblem of the Royal Order of the Garter. #ThatWordChat

The symposium lectures will also become a special issue of the journal Dictionaries, so the scholarship reaches people beyond those who attended in person. #ThatWordChat

Question from the room: how do you keep a collection like this from just languishing on a shelf? Adams's promise was to look after it in its early years and promote it publicly. The blog, the exhibition, the symposium are all part of that commitment. #ThatWordChat

What Adams credits the Kripke estate: knowing this was Madeline's life work and legacy, and agreeing with her dictionary friends that it had to be held somewhere as a collection, not broken up. "We just happened to be in the right place at the right time under the right conditions." #ThatWordChat

Adams: "I consider it a real deal in the end, and I think the library does too." #ThatWordChat

The timing was serendipitous. The Lilly Library had just come off a decade-long bicentennial fundraising campaign. Someone had given them a million dollars specifically to acquire a collection. The cost of acquiring, packing, and shipping came in under that mark. #ThatWordChat

With no time to appraise 20,000 books for sale, maybe the Lilly Library could acquire the collection on the terms it would have to be given. So he went to the director and asked if he was interested. #ThatWordChat

The exhibition runs through late July. Adams is already pitching the next one: Madeline's “hobo, tramp, and traveler collection.” "There's something that really mattered to her, and stuff that people don't usually see." #ThatWordChat

Want to see some of what's in the collection before you dive deeper? The Lilly Library blog has been documenting specimens from the Kripke Collection: blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/tag/kripke-c... #ThatWordChat

The Whole World in a Book: An Exhibition and Symposium

IU Libraries Blogs

blogs.libraries.indiana.edu

Why did Kripke's estate choose Indiana University? Adams thinks a big part of it was that it's a public institution. You don't have to be a professor. You can walk in off the street, register as a patron, and look at the collection. #ThatWordChat

Adams: "One of these days we'll want to know more about the business of making dictionaries. That'll be the collection in which we find the evidence." #ThatWordChat

If you’re looking for 17th-century bilingual dictionaries, you have to ask, check the inventory, and find the boxes. Adams says he can almost guarantee the box you need is at the bottom of a pile. "It will take forever to catalog the whole thing." #ThatWordChat

The "low hanging fruit": 20th century books, because the Library of Congress already has records for them. Older and rarer material takes much, much longer. #ThatWordChat

Here's why the blog has only covered ~42 items out of 20,000: a third of the collection is still, in Adams' words, terra incognita. They don't even know what those books are yet. #ThatWordChat

Question from the room: what are the challenges of housing and displaying a collection this size? Adams: Even a library as large as Indiana University's Lilly Library can't store everything on site. Much of the Kripke Collection is currently in storage and will be for a while. #ThatWordChat

Kripke wasn't the only one who caught on to commercially motivated dictionaries, but she really realized this was always going on and collected as many as she could. These are the things people have and don't know they have. #ThatWordChat

Dictionaries were used for marketing and gifts. The Kripke Collection is full of evidence of this. #ThatWordChat

If you bought your kid shoes at the start of the school year, you almost always went home with a dictionary too. Buster Brown did it. Lots of shoe companies did it. #ThatWordChat

For example, a bagel shop in the Los Angeles area produced a fold-out glossary of Yiddish terms to hand out with purchases. Adams: if you're in Southern California trying to establish yourself as a legit bagel purveyor, "what better way" to build credibility? #ThatWordChat

Adams had barely considered it before the collection. Dictionaries were used as commercial gifts, the way a barber might get a calendar from his supplier at the end of the year. #ThatWordChat

Adams: it didn't change his view of slang so much, but it taught him things about language and culture he never expected. #ThatWordChat