You'll want a Secretary and Sorter at first besides H, 2 in preparing the A work for you. You shd have all the A slips pickt out first, they're in packets, except such as are in the 2 or 3 G. Eliot packets whose slips want written catchword … I hope you have, or very soon will have your whole room shelved. It is the only plan of keeping the slips easily accessible and moveable.
You've never acknowledged receipt of any of the little Dicty packets I've posted to you. Pray don't treat stranger contributors so, or they'll put it down to indifference or rudeness. Have some receipt Post Cards or forms printed, & let H. acknowledge the receipt of everything …
Some of the outer slips have got torn, &'ll need mending. You've probably laid in a supply of gum.
Once the carrier had dumped the enormous pile, Murray ferreted around in it for a few hours and then stood back—professing himself shocked and appalled by the condition of it all. There were boxes of slips, neatly arranged, to be sure. But some of the subeditors had put their hundredweight collections of papers into hessian 3 sacks, and then left them to rot. Murray found a dead rat in one of these, and then in another a live mouse with her family, all of the creatures contentedly nibbling away at the paper, making bedding for themselves out of years worth of lexical scholarship. Many of the sacks had been left in dampbasements and stables for ages, and their contents were dampand mouldy. The writing had in many cases faded, or else was so illegible that Murray said it would have been far better for them to have been written in Chinese, since he could always obtain the services of a translator.
One sub-editor had delivered his slips in a baby's bassinet; another—responsible for headwords beginning with I—had left his in a broken-bottomed hamper in a long-empty vicarage in Harrow. Furnivall had tried to keepa list of the addresses of all those to whom he had entrusted slips, but his minuscule address book (bound in wrinkled brown leather with a white paper label stuck to its side—infuriatingly he remembered it all too well) had gone missing, and the two men had the devil's own time tracking the various men who, if still alive, had a fair chance of still retaining the papers. But even that wouldn't have been entirely useful, since many sub-editors had died or moved (a large number of vicars, for example, were already venerable when Coleridge made contact back in the 1850s), leaving behind them piles of slips `to tender mercies of indignant tenants or grasping landlords', as Murray was to write.
By the early summer of 1879 the severity of the situation seemed all too clear. The letter H was missing in its entirety, as was the slightly less important Q and Pa. The slips for G were very nearly burned with the household rubbish when one Mrs Wilkes turned out the house in the wake of her husband's death.
And yet in fact things turned out to be—at least in these three instances—not so bad after all. H was found in Florence—it had been given to the American businessman and diplomat George Perkins Marsh, who took the slips to Italy and then found that his eyesight was too poor to work on them any more, and left them in his villa in the Tuscan hills. Q turned upin the English Midlands town of Loughborough, in the care of one J. G. Middleton, who thought the project had been abandoned. And Pa (Furnivall could never explain how it came to be separated from the entirety of P-Py) was found in a stable in County Cavan, where some of the slips had already been used for lighting fires. The Mr Smith to whom the relatively small selection of slips 4 had been entrusted was an Irish clergyman who had been obliged to quit his living on the disestablishment of the Irish church, and had then died; his brother had taken charge of them and in due course handed them over to a complete stranger for what was laughably supposed to be safe keeping. It was from this stranger's stable that the housemaids mistook the slips for spills. Not all of the Pa slips were burned, but it took fresh volunteers many months of hard reading to replace the quotations that had been lost in a succession of Cavan hearths.
The sub-editor for the letter O also proved to be something of a nuisance. He was called W. J. E. Crane, and he lived in Brixton, and it was there that he resolutely kept hold of his slips, being obtusely and mysteriously unwilling to relinquish them. Entreaties seemed not to work; a visit by one of Murray's assistants proved fruitless because Crane was away and no one in his household would release the papers; and then lawyers had to be hired, and everyone became insanely worried lest Crane, in a fit of rage, make his whole collection into a bonfire. In the end, `by great importunity', Murray got the papers out of Crane's hands and into Mill Hill—but it was, at one time, touch-and-go for a letter that was to occupy 356 pages, from O itself, via Oaf to Ozonous.
(In later years there were further trials, as might be expected with so vast a project. Words beginning with the preposition invanished when they were in proof and on their way to the printers, but eventually turned up. A policeman happened to find a packet of copy dropped in the street, and restored it to its editors unscathed. And at the very end of the enterprise one entire word— bondmaid—was found to have been left out of the first edition altogether: its slips had fallen down behind some books, and the editors had never noticed that it was gone.)
But now where, once the great pile had been found and gathered and assembled, to put it all? `Sunnyside' was a pleasing and comfortable Victorian house, true; but by 1879 James and Ada already had six of their eventual eleven children, and some of them were at nursery age, others ready for the schoolroom. The idea of having the family house filled to the brim with two tons or more of dusty paper piles was pure anathema to the houseproud Ada, no matter how supportive she might have been of her husband. He had, quite simply, to find somewhere else to do his work.
His first thought was to rent a neighbouring cottage. Mill Hill in those days was a village on the edge of London, and there was indeed a small house with a thatched roof on Hammer's Lane that seemed suitable for the purpose. But the thatch was the problem: it created, Murray thought, too much of a fire risk. If he took it, it would only be to house one of his assistants.
And then Ada saw in one of the illustrated gardening magazines an advertisement for a new type of small shed-like structure, ugly and made of corrugated iron, and which the wealthier type of people used for potting, or storage, or housing their lawn-rollers or their diligences. The Sunnyside back garden, it turned out, was large enough to accommodate one of the larger models; the school governors, perhaps unaware of just quite how ugly it was, gave their sanction to its construction; and so at about the time that the first piles of slips began to come in from Primrose Hill, from Florence, from Brixton, and from all other points of the compass, the shed was bought (for £150) and swiftly put up. It took three weeks to build. It had skylights and was lined with deal, and was painted grey with a brown roof. Some said it looked like a Methodist chapel.
Murray had his brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven build and install on the walls a set of no fewer than 1,029 pigeon-holes— it will be remembered that Coleridge, twenty years before, had optimistically imagined that his nest of 54 would be sufficient. Visitors remarked on how in this new incarnation pigeon-holes seemed to dominate everything in the little building—every available wall was either covered with them or with plain deal shelving, some of which was horizontal and some sloping, and with a beaded edge to prevent books falling to the floor. There was a look of studied purpose in all that Murray did.