If you think of language as fixed this collection is the proof that it is not. Words have their day, are born, live and their meanings die. Those that survive often are so changed as to be unrecognizable across the centuries. How they have changed and why they have changed are questions for forensic historians to meddle into submission. It is Madeline's ambition to provide an extraordinary collection for scholars and the simply interested to see in the history of dictionaries and the words and definitions they contain something to illuminate the past, present and future. So Madeline is busy. In this transitional moment the material flows freely into the market from a thousand places. How long this lasts no one really knows. This is certainly a rare moment and Madeline, a diminutive woman with the mind of an Aries, is framing the subject in an entirely new way.
One does not go so deeply and not go deeper yet and so the biographies of lexicographers have several shelves and etymology a section. There is even an early example of a manual of instruction for salesmen of a dictionary. After all, someone had to sell the books. There is a section of photographs and photographic calling cards of lexicographers as well.
The collection gives the misimpression of completeness for there are about 20,000 items already gathered from the internet, auctions, dealer catalogues and offerings. Actually it is a work in progress for every day that mail and packages can be delivered often 3 or 4 are. Hence the accumulation of the arriving; endless unwrapping, and momentary savoring inevitably next to follow the expectation of further discoveries to be unearthed before sleep would overcome.
From these and other opportunities as they present themselves Madeline continues to acquire, even as she every day creates a scholarly database that may in time carry her name, reputation and steadfast efforts on to generations yet unborn that may find in the history of dictionaries, through her extensive records, a clearer understanding of words and their complex relationship to time. It is her goal that someday the collection will be fully accessible on the net under the administration of an institution to which she gifts what a modern slang dictionary might call the whole enchilada. They will act as gatekeeper and guardian to this history of language that at once can and should be both an extraordinary collection and a magnet that attracts additional material, as it emerges, to join the collection's electronic shelves; a collection that illuminates and snowballs.
But 20,000 is, never was, and will be enough. So the innocent arrivals day by day find in her a higher purpose, their aging paper and decaying bindings to be united in her pursuit of the very meaning of the history of words - to yield progress and human understanding, the scale of her thinking biblical, utterly unique.
So forgive her accessions for never guessing on this beautiful August day in 2007 in Greenwich Village, they would meet their regimental partners there and then, unaware that the cool, affable and deeply determined woman who scurries from project to appointment and back is to be their highly disciplined taskmaster, they soon to understand she intends to make them an army that will carry the love of lexicography and its history in many forms deep into the centuries ahead.
Human beings are complex and their intellectual perspectives personal. We live in an era that celebrates the current moment at the expense of historical perspective. Some few see, in the history of dictionaries and the shifting definitions of words, the Geiger counter clicks of changing attitude that reflect much that we too routinely deny. In dictionaries then we can see more than simply words: we can see ourselves.
So this woman who has never had a child, in her commitment to sharing, is determined to make a contribution from which we can all learn. In time her material will become broadly searchable on line, thereby crossing the boundary that divides the great collections from the great resources. So even today, as she continues to acquire material, she is creating the catalogue that will frame this resource, an effort that will bind the past and present to the future.
