Next is a group of books that strike me as odd in some fashion. Three have odd titles: English Syntitholgy, by James Brown, 12mo., Boston and Philadelphia 1842; The Kirografik Teecher, by John Brown Smith, 8vo., Amherst 1878; Epeögraphy, by Joseph B. Manning, Boston 1829. Then there are books with odd contents, an example of which is James Ruggles' A Universal Language, Cincinnati 1829. Its attempt to make an artificial language "formed on philosophical and analogical principles" yields a welter of jarring print that is rough going to say the least. And an odd but charming imprint belongs to Francis Butler's The Spanish Teacher, 16mo., published in New York in 1849 by the Havana Segar Mart, 205 Water-Street.
There are many books by and about the venerable (but in my opinion, not so beloved) Noah Webster. One example is a four-page folio announcement, which was folded and mailed to a publisher in January 1830, entitled Series of books for systematic instruction in the English language. By Noah Webster. The first page promotes four of Webster's books and bears the printed signatures of supporting dignitaries. The second page is wholly blank, and the third has a full-page manuscript letter by Webster asking the publisher to return the sheet with approbations to be written on the blank sheet. The fourth page bears the franking marks. This ephemeral piece shows Noah Webster to be the famously aggressive self-promoter he was all along.
Another piece, a pamphlet published in Albany in 1851 (a few years after Webster's death) shows still more of Websterian gumption. This New York State government document, by James W. Beekman, titled Report of minority of committee on literature in reference to the purchase of school districts of Webster's Dictionary, contains a letter by Washington Irving. In the letter Irving expresses his anger after tactfully giving a negative reply to a solicitation from Webster, only to find his few positive phrases (leaving out his refusal to endorse the work) appear in the promotional literature for Webster's Quarto Dictionary.
The quarto February 1928 issue (Vol. XIII, No. 143) of The Periodical, published both at Oxford and at New York (the American edition), celebrates the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1884-1928. The issue contains photographic portraits of the editors and those who were involved in the dictionary's publication and provides a historical overview, in some detail, of how the work was compiled. A small brochure, a 16mo., also published in 1928, gives the text of the speech by Stanley Baldwin at the dinner celebrating the completion of the dictionary.
In the field of Americana, there is the series of papers, initially appearing under the pseudonymous byline "The Druid," in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser, Philadelphia 1781. (Alas, this issue is not in my library!) The series was republished in the Philadelphia 1801 collected works of Jonathan Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence and president of Princeton University. In "The Druid" No. V, Witherspoon coins a new term, "Americanisms," and proposes several criteria for inclusion in this class of words.
Later, in 1815, John Pickering's A Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which are Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America first appeared in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. III. This essay in dictionary form was republished a year later in 1816 as an expanded book of the same title. Pickering leaned toward seeing American English as somewhat barbaric and inferior to the language spoken and written in England. One of my copies of his book bears a presentation by Lewis Tappan, a noted merchant and abolitionist of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York, to his brother Benjamin, a Steubenville, Ohio, legislator, jurist, and anti-slavery leader. The rear pastedown contains a list in ink headed "my contribs" with corresponding page numbers. On each of the listed pages there is an inked check mark and a vertical marginal line noting a passage that cites "a correspondent" or "an obliging correspondent." This copy, thus, identifies one of Pickering's formerly unknown sources.
Rounding off this category, there is the first systematic bibliography of American English, published in Albany in 1883 in The Transactions of the Albany Institute, Vol. X. The author, Gilbert M. Tucker, concludes his essay entitled "American English" with a useful though brief (three pages only) discriminated list of relevant publications.
