Printed dictionaries - publishing dinosaurs or endangered species?

Harry Campbell, our guest blogger looks at the turmoil being felt in the dictionary world.

It’s been a funny week in dictionaries. The 300th anniversary of the birth of Dr Samuel Johnson has been celebrated with endless radio programmes and snippets of his definitions. Johnson was an extraordinary man who could almost be said to have invented the English dictionary as we know it. His supposed dislike of all things Scottish is often mentioned, but of course one of his best friends, his first biographer, was a Scot.

Dictionaries are one of those areas where Scotland has really made its mark. Perhaps the most famous Scottish lexicographer was James Murray, the foremost editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. A self-educated polymath from a poor home, he combined the relentless, uncompromising rigour necessary to produce a first-class text with the resilience to see the thing though to publication, no mean task for anyone, let alone a tailor’s son from a small town in the Borders struggling for acceptance in the stiff, snobbish world of Victorian Oxford.

But the OED, currently running to twenty volumes, was never meant to be a mass-market item. The dictionary on the writer’s desk or the crossword enthusiast’s coffee-table was and is very likely to come from Chambers of Edinburgh, whose founders were also sons of the Borders. Like Murray, William and Robert Chambers were poor and largely self-taught, their father’s textile business having been ruined in the Napoleonic wars. Starting out as booksellers and moving into publishing, they specialised in educational works, notably an encyclopedia which appeared in no fewer than 520 parts between 1859 and 1868. The famous Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary first appeared in 1901, and a century later sailed boldly on into the new millennium as Chambers 21st Century Dictionary. Despite their abruptly curtailed educations (and, apparently, the congenital deformity of six fingers and six toes on each hand and foot), they did pretty well for themselves. The elder brother, William Chambers of Glenormiston, almost like some fairy-tale hero, ended up as Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and is commemorated by an enormous statue in a street named after him.

But all this worthy self-improvement need not preclude a sense of fun. The Chambers Dictionary is very much a word-lover’s companion, the traditional choice of the Scrabble player and crossword enthusiast, delighting in weird and wonderful vocabulary. It’s also known, rather like Johnson’s dictionary before it, for its occasionally jocular or satirical definitions, such as the one at éclair, which famously begins “a cake, long in shape but short in duration...”. The Chambers website has a blog rejoicing in the name of Clishmaclaver, a couthy Scottish colloquialism meaning casual chat or gossip. The whole outfit manages to convey an exuberant love of words. Basically, they have style as well as authority.

Like its Glasgow rival, Collins, which started out at much the same time and is now part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Chambers was a family firm until quite recently: Antony Chambers, whose great-great-grandfather Robert founded the company, died in 2007. These firms chugged along happily enough for generation after generation, producing honest-to-goodness items like dictionaries and encyclopaedias, diaries and bibles, before finally being gobbled up by the media empires that now run everything, with their short-term attitudes and their lust for quick returns. And as you know already if you read Caroline’s blog, Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh is now facing closure, taking with it not only 27 jobs but a huge chunk of publishing history.

I don’t think it’s excessive to describe this as a tragedy. It’s the end of an era, a sign of the times, a loss not just to Scotland or Britain but to the English-speaking world. Who can say where the printed book will be in ten or twenty years? Already people are predicting the death of the newspaper; dictionaries, which are so much more convenient and powerful in electronic form than as expensive slabs of dead tree, are surely in much greater danger. The staff at Chambers are hoping a rabbit can be pulled out the hat to save the day, but the two big beasts of the Scottish press, the Scotsman in Edinburgh and the Herald in Glasgow, have said their affectionate farewells.

A week after the closure was announced, the English press, as far as I can see, has yet to find a single column inch to devote to the news.

Harry Campbell is a lexicographer and author of the highly entertaining Whatever happened to Tanganyika?