The book is laid out in three columns, each essentially ten inches tall and two-and-a-half inches wide. The body type is a classic British Imperial-era face called Clarendon, which had been designed and the punches cut in 1845 by Benjamin Fox for Robert Besley at London's renowned Fann Street Foundry: it used boldface for the headwords, and then a variety of styles (light and italic among them) and a variety of fount sizes for the various elements that Murray decided required illustration. 13 The definitions are set in Old Style; the quotations in a smaller fount size of the same. All kinds of typographical device—daggers, parallels, inferior and superior stress marks, numbers—are there to mark various elements of each word. A bewildering variety of other typefaces are used as well—not the least of them Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, Greek, and the various symbols of Old English (such as thorns, yoghs, wyns, ashes, and eths), and, in the dictionary section that is devoted to what lexicographers call `orthoepy', and which all else call `correct pronunciation', the equally arcane and irritatingly non-intuitive symbols of the phonetic alphabet.
It was on 19 April 1882 that Murray sent off a first batch of all-butfinished copy to the Clarendon Press printing house at Oxford. Things were now moving, and in terms of the glacier-like mobility of the dictionary world, they were moving fast. Some days later, in early May 1882, he signalled the epochal moment of possible publication to his fellow members of the Philological Society. It had been three years since his appointment as editor: now at last he was able to employ the words that have been already used as the epigraph to Chapter 2: `The great fact … is, that the Dictionary is now at last really launched, and that some forty pages are in type, of which forty-eight columns have reached me in proof.'
Since he was now in the business of editing the book, rather than collecting material for it, he decided that he could now call a halt—or at least a temporary halt—to the main volunteer reading programme. `The general amassing of quotations must cease with the present year,' he declared. By now he had enough slips (about three and a half million) to be going on with, and he decided he would in future ask for more books to be read only when he needed to fill a gap, or when he was uncertain whether the quotations he already had truly did represent the full history of a particular word. He would also make uplists of those words for which he felt he needed citations earlier than those his volunteers had already found. He called these lists his desiderata—and such lists also still exist today, as the modern editors of the OED entreat today's volunteers to see if they can spy any uses of words at earlier dates than so far found.
Meanwhile, the proof pages began to come back from the compositors' stones. Each page was set by hand. So complex was the typesetting that every sheet was reckoned to cost about £5 to make up. 14 Dozens of compositors were involved: one of them, James C. Gilbert—a slender man, balding with a regallooking and very tidy white beard—appears, remarkably, to have worked on the entire run of the Dictionary. He joined the Press as an apprentice in 1880, then, according to a brief appreciation of his almost unimaginably long tenure, he recalled how he `lifted his first take … in 1882, at an early stage of the letter A', and was still working 36 years later when the final words (which all began with W, not Z, as will be explained) were set in January 1928. `James Gilbert had worked for a greater length of time and had set more type for the Dictionary than any other compositor,' the brochure records.
The return of the proofs sparked off one of the many internal schisms that seemed to plague the early days of this great enterprise. They were, said one of those who glimpsed them, perhaps `the most heavily corrected proofs ever known', and had been covered with pencil corrections on almost every one of 2,600 lines of type that, on average, make up an eight-page sheet of the Dictionary. Many lines had themselves twenty changes to them—meaning that every single sheet could have as many as 10,000 proof marks, necessitating alterations, the expenditure of much time—and great cost.
Scores of factors caused the project to take as long as it did: not the least was the prodigious complexity of proof-reading and correcting, as this one page, shown halfway through its progress from first assembly to final printing, will suggest.
James Gilbert, a compositor at Oxford University Press appears, uniquely, to have worked on the entire Dictionary—lifting the first type for the letter A in 1882, and working until the completion of the final volume in 1928.
It was this particular prospect that apparently raised the hackles of Benjamin Jowett, in his capacity as ex officio chairman of the Delegates. Both he in particular, and the Delegates in general, began behaving in a way that Murray found most disturbing. Jowett—whose publicly stated aim was `to arrange my life in the best possible way, that I may be able to arrange other people's'—embarked on a sudden campaign of highly aggressive interference. Towards the end of July 1883 Jowett invited Murray to come up from London and stay in a guest room at Balliol; the next day he took Murray with him when he went to visit both the full body of the Delegates and then, more ominously, to see members of a hitherto moribund subcommittee that had been set up three years before specifically to look into any problems which might arise with the Dictionary. Jowett showed them all the massively corrected proofs for part of the first section, he explained how much it would cost the Press to deal with all of them, and, in an autocratic style for which he was notorious, he argued fiercely that changes needed to be made. He handed Murray a document: `Suggestions for Guidance in Preparing Copy for the Press'.
Murray, who was already upset, and by turns furious and dismayed by his treatment, went through the roof. He spluttered, he fulminated, he raged in public and in private. How dare Jowett and his minions—men who had not the faintest notion of the way that Murray worked or of the methods of the men and women in the Scriptorium—tell him how to run a dictionary? How dare some anonymous Delegate suggest, for example, that the words aardvark and aardwolf, words that are meat and drink to any beginning lexicographer, be omitted because they were deemed too scientific or too foreign? How dare Jowett suggest that newspapers not be used as source material? that only the works of `great authors' should be cited? that there should be no illustrations of words quoted from later than 1875 (nothing modern, in other words)? And that scientific and `slang' words be omitted unless they had appeared in the better sorts of literature?
`I am sure', Murray said when he had cooled down a little, `the time will come when this criticism will be pointed out as a most remarkable instance of the inability of men to acknowledge contemporary facts and read the signs of the times.' What the Delegates were demanding was a series of economies that would surely rob the book of its likely authority. `The Dictionary can be made better in quality', Murray wrote, `only by more care, more work, more time.' This was not the moment to try to speed things up, to cut corners and trim fat, and to risk making a shoddy book in place of the great one Murray had in mind.