The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon WinchesterBut Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.
Read more...
1. The dead of night in Lambeth Marsh
2. The man who taught Latin to cattle
3. The madness of war
4. Gathering Earth's daughters
5. The big dictionary conceived
6. The scholar in cell block two
7. Entering the lists
8. Annulated, art, brick-tea, buckwheat
9. The meeting of minds
10. The unkindest cut
11. Then only the monuments
Mysterious (mistîe · ries), a. [f. L. mystérium Myster