"Not Less than Six Months": Compiling the First Draft of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

ABSTRACT:I have previously looked in detail at the preliminary process by which the overall plan for and structure of the first edition (1941) of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was discussed and decided (Knowles 2004), and at the five-year production phase of the project, between 1935, when the first proofs were produced, and 1941, when the book appeared (Knowles 2019). The purpose of this article is to look in more detail at the first stages of the project in which the base material was assembled, with particular attention given to what we now know about the work of a number of individual contributors and compilers, together with the contribution of those additional scholars and specialists who from time to time were also consulted. New archival material has been adduced to demonstrate the network of personal and professional contacts invoked to provide the raw material for the text. Consideration is given to the way in which the methodology for this work of popular reference reflected the practice established for the creation of major scholarly lexical dictionaries. There is a significant and growing body of work devoted to the history of such dictionaries; it is suggested that dictionaries of quotations are similarly worthy of such attention.