Roget's Thesaurus, 1936
Nov. 13th, 2014 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI said I was going to write about the books I picked up at the friends of the library book sale at my university!
I'm going to start with my 1936 Roget's Thesaurus. This is a beautiful book. I'm not going to do this with all of them, but I want to share a few pictures of this one with you.
It has a somewhat unassuming cover, with shining gold text on a dull red background. But what really makes this book beautiful is the way its form follows its function to produce a a double-indexed system that is both pleasingly symmetrical to look at and elegantly functional to use. Notice the thumb indexing on each side of the book.
Working in the archives, I've come to appreciate the complexity of trying to manually index extensive materials in a usable, intuitive way. It isn't easy, and the effort deserves appreciation! This thesaurus is indexed both numerically and alphabetically. Looking through the alphabetical side with a work in mind allows you to quickly locate it, and possibly a few related words, along with the word's number in the numeric portion of the book. Then you can find the word by number in the numerically-indexed portion, which contains an array of synonyms, antonyms, and thematically similar words. And beyond that, the physical presence of the thumb-indents just makes me smile.
Another valuable feature of the thesaurus is that thematic organization. Not only does each word's lengthy selection of related terms offer an array of lexical food for thought, but the words themselves are ordered in thematic categories. As examples, there are sections dealing with number, time, and space (with sub-categories like absolute, relative, and recurrent), intellect, volition, affections (in the sense of emotions), and more.
I've never picked up and really looked at a Roget's thesaurus, so I'm not sure how this compares to newer versions. My advisor told me that she finds a classic copy of Roget's to be a much more efficacious writing tool than newer versions because of this kind of layout, so I gather it's changed a bit. It was largely due to her suggestion that I picked up this copy when I saw it hiding on a table under another book on my second day of browsing the sale. I'm glad I did.
It may sound overly dramatic, but this wonderful 78-year-old book has reawakened a certain appreciation of, excitement at, and perhaps awe over, my native language. I indulged in some page-flipping through it a couple days ago, looking at various words, reading through all the offered relationships and thinking about the marvelous complexity of the way we humans encode concepts into words. Words are so very multi-vocalic; they speak with different voices depending on the knowledge and experiences of the reader. Reading through a given word's conceptual cousins (be they from friendly or hostile branches of the family) drives home the complexity embedded in the seemingly simple metaphorical expressions that lie behind each collection of letters into a meaningful unit.
This book makes me happy. Its instructions were bed-time reading for me earlier this week as I snuggled under my blankets to enjoy the introductory material about the concepts employed in its layout.
I'm going to start with my 1936 Roget's Thesaurus. This is a beautiful book. I'm not going to do this with all of them, but I want to share a few pictures of this one with you.
It has a somewhat unassuming cover, with shining gold text on a dull red background. But what really makes this book beautiful is the way its form follows its function to produce a a double-indexed system that is both pleasingly symmetrical to look at and elegantly functional to use. Notice the thumb indexing on each side of the book.
Working in the archives, I've come to appreciate the complexity of trying to manually index extensive materials in a usable, intuitive way. It isn't easy, and the effort deserves appreciation! This thesaurus is indexed both numerically and alphabetically. Looking through the alphabetical side with a work in mind allows you to quickly locate it, and possibly a few related words, along with the word's number in the numeric portion of the book. Then you can find the word by number in the numerically-indexed portion, which contains an array of synonyms, antonyms, and thematically similar words. And beyond that, the physical presence of the thumb-indents just makes me smile.
Another valuable feature of the thesaurus is that thematic organization. Not only does each word's lengthy selection of related terms offer an array of lexical food for thought, but the words themselves are ordered in thematic categories. As examples, there are sections dealing with number, time, and space (with sub-categories like absolute, relative, and recurrent), intellect, volition, affections (in the sense of emotions), and more.
I've never picked up and really looked at a Roget's thesaurus, so I'm not sure how this compares to newer versions. My advisor told me that she finds a classic copy of Roget's to be a much more efficacious writing tool than newer versions because of this kind of layout, so I gather it's changed a bit. It was largely due to her suggestion that I picked up this copy when I saw it hiding on a table under another book on my second day of browsing the sale. I'm glad I did.
It may sound overly dramatic, but this wonderful 78-year-old book has reawakened a certain appreciation of, excitement at, and perhaps awe over, my native language. I indulged in some page-flipping through it a couple days ago, looking at various words, reading through all the offered relationships and thinking about the marvelous complexity of the way we humans encode concepts into words. Words are so very multi-vocalic; they speak with different voices depending on the knowledge and experiences of the reader. Reading through a given word's conceptual cousins (be they from friendly or hostile branches of the family) drives home the complexity embedded in the seemingly simple metaphorical expressions that lie behind each collection of letters into a meaningful unit.
This book makes me happy. Its instructions were bed-time reading for me earlier this week as I snuggled under my blankets to enjoy the introductory material about the concepts employed in its layout.
