Stranger Than Fiction Book Club

Sometimes real life can be stranger than fiction. Join us for a nonfiction book club discussion of The Professor and the Madman: A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Copies of the book are available for checkout in the library.
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86970586831
Meeting ID: 869 7058 6831

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray and Dr. William Chester Minor, one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.