He bought desks and tables—and, in a nod to the way Samuel Johnson is supposed to have worked, he had the chippy build a foot-high dais at one end of the room, on which he could place his own chair and desk, and from which eyrie he could survey the work of his helpers. He decided that while everyone else seemed to call this nasty and dampand unhealthy little building `the Shed', he would dignify it by the name monks gave to the room in which they prepared illuminated manuscripts: `the Scriptorium'. The name stuck—to this building in Mill Hill, and later when the project moved to Oxford.
All that remained was for James Murray to put on top of his greying head the black silk velvet biretta that had been part of his vestments when he received his Edinburgh LL D. He had remarked then that the capwas modelled on that worn by his hero John Knox (although the founder of the Church of Scotland was also the author of the phrase `the monstrous regiment of women', which did not reflect the thinking of Murray, for whom women were a boon in myriad ways). No matter its origin: James Murray was to wear his old Knox capfor every one of his 35 years of editing that followed. Pictures of him clad thus, surrounded by row upon row of slip-filled pigeon-holes and against a background of shelves of learned books, and with a groupof suited and scholarly looking helpers in the background, remain classic illustrations of the lexicographic art, as well as being an image of Murray from which he, a proud man now not entirely unaware of his growing worth, derived great pleasure.
So now, come the late spring of 1879, the Scriptorium—the Scrippy—was declared by Murray to be `in full orderly work'. He was ready, he announced, to receive interested visitors, and to show them himself and his general staff beginning their formidable battle.
Once he had settled down to draw breath and plan his campaign, Murray realized that, voluminous though the mass of material now arranged along his Scriptorium walls was, it just was not enough. One problem was that readers had never bothered to consider with much enthusiasm what might be called the ordinary words of the language—they had succumbed to an understandable temptation to send in slips for interesting words, but not for the prosaic ones. So the supply slips for these banal words was meagre, almost useless. `Thus of abusion,' writes Murray, referring to an unusual word that means deception or outrage, `we found in the slips about 50 instances: of abuse, not five.' It was clear that to solve this problem, fresh instructions to readers needed to be issued, and, what is more, that very many more volunteers needed to be pressed into service.
The Scriptorium (Mill Hill)
Within weeks of taking on the job, Murray acted. He first persuaded the Clarendon Press to issue his now-famous Appeal, and had it published quickly, at the end of April 1879. This was a four-page printed document entitled `An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public in Great Britain, America and the British Colonies to read books and make extracts for the Philological Society's New English Dictionary'. Readers were wanted, Murray wrote, `to finish the volunteer work so enthusiastically commenced twenty years ago, by reading and extracting the books which still remain unexamined'. So there were four further pages that listed the `unexamined' books that Murray thought it might be useful for volunteers to read. Two thousand copies of the Appeal were printed, with Murray pleading in each that `a thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for, to complete the work as far as possible within the next three years'. He summarized the kind of reading that needed to be done:
In the Early English period up to the invention of Printing, so much has been done and is doing that little outside help is needed. But few of the earliest printed books—those of Caxton and his successors—have yet been read, and any one who has the opportunity and time to read one or more of these, either in the originals, or accurate reprints, will confer valuable assistance by so doing. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory. The nineteenth-century books, being within the reach of everyone, have been read widely; but a large number remain unrepresented, not only of those published during the last ten years while the Dictionary has been in abeyance, but also of earlier date. But it is in the eighteenth century above all that help is urgently needed. The American scholars promised to get the eighteenth century literature taken up in the United States, a promise which they appear not to have … fulfilled, and we must now appeal to English readers to share the task, for nearly the whole of that century's books, with the exception of Burke's works, have still to be gone through.
The first page of the Appeal for Readers, written by Murray and sent to bookshops and libraries across the English-speaking world,
with which he assembled the immense army of unpaid helpers for the making of the OED.
This formula cast the net: but what exactly was to be swept up into it? To widen the selection—to make sure that abuse got treatment as fair as abusion, for instance—Murray offered some gently phrased guidance:
Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way.
Take special note of passages which show or imply that a word is either new and tentative, or needing explanation as obsolete and archaic, and which thus help to fix the date of its introduction or disuse.
Make as many quotations as you can for ordinary words, especially when they are used significantly, and tend by the context to explain or suggest their own meaning.
The leaflet was distributed first to newspapers, who treated it as a press release and printed extracts as they saw fit. Then it was sent off in bulk to bookshops and libraries, in the United Kingdom and America, in Australia, Canada. Anyone borrowing or buying a book would likely find, tucked between the pages, this small and elegantly designed little document. The first 2,000 were swiftly augmented by a further print run of 500. And the leaflet found itself, evidently, in many other places besides those to which it was first sent. More than 800 men and women responded in total, saying that they were happy to help—and by squinting at their names written in the small type of the various Prefaces to the very first finished parts of the Dictionary we may learn something of who they were, as well as the success of the brochure's scatter-shot landings.
Aside from the hundreds of towns and villages in the British Isles that provided enthusiastic new readers, there are submissions written from would-be volunteers living in Austria, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Holland, New South Wales, Indiana, Calcutta, New York, San Francisco, Ceylon, Arkansas, New Zealand, and Wisconsin, and a dozen other places besides.