Books in Brief

Johnson’s Dictionary, A Modern Selection, edited by E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne (Pantheon, $6.50). The editors assure us that a reprint of the complete Dictionary—out of print for a hundred years—would be “impressive and unread.” So they compile a Johnson’s Dictionary for those unwilling to read Johnson’s Dictionary— a word book for logophobes. It is not surprising that this becomes, in effect, a larger version of those Johnsonian selections one encounters in bedside books. The quaint, the witty, the antiquated definitions are given in bits and snatches. The illustrative citations from literature, carefully chosen by Johnson to give the flavor of each word, are haphazardly included. To lose the order and gradation of meanings supplied under a word in Johnson’s original volume is to lose, often, an argument, an essay, a traced rhythm of ideas emanating from a word. The same precision and pacing found in the statement of single meanings (“apparatus: things provided as means to any certain end, as the tools of a trade; the furniture of a house; ammunition for war; equipage; show”) can be felt in the linking of sixteen definitions and twenty-five illustrations under the word “answer.” But these are pleasures not to be had from the McAdam-Milne grab bag, which not only revives the discredited vaudevillian approach to Johnson as Trained Bear, but perhaps puts further off the day when—for those who have not forgotten how to read and think—the whole Dictionary will once more be made available.

G. WILLS

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Johnson’s Dictionary, A Modern Selection, edited by E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne (Pantheon, $6.50). The editors assure us that a reprint of the complete Dictionary—out of print for a hundred years—would be “impressive and unread.” So they compile a Johnson’s Dictionary for those unwilling to read Johnson’s Dictionary— a word book for logophobes. It is not surprising that this becomes, in effect, a larger version of those Johnsonian selections one encounters in bedside books. The quaint, the witty, the antiquated definitions are given in bits and snatches. The illustrative citations from literature, carefully chosen by Johnson to give the flavor of each word, are haphazardly included. To lose the order and gradation of meanings supplied under a word in Johnson’s original volume is to lose, often, an argument, an essay, a traced rhythm of ideas emanating from a word. The same precision and pacing found in the statement of single meanings (“apparatus: things provided as means to any certain end, as the tools of a trade; the furniture of a house; ammunition for war; equipage; show”) can be felt in the linking of sixteen definitions and twenty-five illustrations under the word “answer.” But these are pleasures not to be had from the McAdam-Milne grab bag, which not only revives the discredited vaudevillian approach to Johnson as Trained Bear, but perhaps puts further off the day when—for those who have not forgotten how to read and think—the whole Dictionary will once more be made available.

G. WILLS