Michael Beller, senior community library manager of the Orinda Library, is proud to showcase an original copy – one of 2,000 – of Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language.” The two-volume dictionary, first printed in 1755, was donated to the newly built library in 1958 by Perc S. Brown, an Orinda resident, in the 1950s.
In a modest display case, stationed in an unassuming spot in the Orinda Library, sits one of the greatest written achievements in the English language. It is something you’d normally see among other cultural artifacts in a marbled chamber of a majestic edifice. It is also the kind of collectible that becomes available at auction or at a rare book dealer’s shop in London or New York for the serious bibliophile.
Yet, here is this old treasure, right in our own library: Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language.”
Born in 1709, Johnson grew up among books in his father’s bookshop in a small cathedral town north of Birmingham, England. His intellectual promise earned him a seat at Oxford University, but family financial difficulties forced him to withdraw just after 13 months.
He may have been removed from this fertile educational environment, but the love of literature remained deeply ingrained within him. Johnson scraped together a living as a magazine writer, poet and translator for several years until he got his break in 1746. A group of publishers, recognizing his sophisticated writing talent, asked him to compile an English dictionary that could match the quality and comprehensiveness of dictionaries already in existence in countries on the continent like France and Italy.
It took Johnson and his six assistants almost nine years to complete the dictionary. Historians and literary scholars note that his was not the first English dictionary (this distinction goes to John Kersey’s “A New English Dictionary,” printed in 1702), but it was the largest collection of commonly used words, with close to 42,000 entries, elegantly organized by etymology, pronunciation and usage context.
Johnson drew upon his extensive learned background, cultivated from his voracious reading, to provide examples of words that appeared in sentences or passages written by authors who would have been familiar to the literate public – Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, to name a few.
He also injected his sense of humor into his work with light sarcasm or mockery. These nuggets pop up infrequently, but there are enough of them to give dictionary readers some unexpected chuckles.
For example, consider one of Johnson’s definitions of “politician”: “A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.” Accompanying this definition is an illustration of usage, relying on Milton:
Your ill-meaning politician lords,
Under pretence of bridal friends and guests,
Appointed to avail me thirty spies.
Johnson’s original dictionary and its subsequent editions served as the standard for Great Britain well into the 19th century, until a massive effort to update the list and definitions of words took place to better reflect the evolved English language.
The “Oxford English Dictionary,” after seven decades of work, was published in 1928. Johnson’s dictionary was finally supplanted as the standard-bearer for the English-speaking world.
However, the Orinda Library owns an original copy, one of 2,000 first printed in 1755, and one of approximately 1,000 extant copies.
How did the library acquire this historically significant literary treasure? Perc S. Brown, a resident of Orinda in the 1950s and early 1960s, donated the two-volume dictionary to the newly built library in 1958.
Brown himself was the Fund Chairman for the Orinda Library Board and the generous contributor of 20% of the $125,000 cost (equivalent to around $1.35 million today) to build the library, according to records kept at the Orinda Historical Society.
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I, Brown had a successful career in the chemicals business, which provided the means to pursue his interest in collecting rare books and manuscripts.
He eventually bestowed many of these items to the libraries of UC Berkeley and Dartmouth College, the alma maters of his two sons.
Among the works accumulated by Brown were first edition books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens – and the first edition of Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary, the 269-year-old tome currently in the display case at the Orinda Library, with its pages currently open at “F” in the A-K volume.
In the second volume, L-Z, the definition for “treasure” is “wealth hoarded; riches accumulated.” The example that follows, quoting from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:
An inventory, importing
The several parcels of his plate, his treasure,
Rich stuffs.
Rich stuffs indeed – rich in history, rich in human achievement – here at our very own community library.
