The World in a Book

Hey friends,

When a woman named Madeline Kripke died in 2020, she left behind an unusual legacy – a collection of 20,000 dictionaries. There are the Merriam-Websters of course, and niche dictionaries of slang, baseball, Yiddish, and more. It is an etymology treasure trove that traces and underlines history and culture.

I was thrilled to explore her collection this past week at Indiana University’s stellar Lilly Library in Bloomington. Scholars and booksellers and people who love words have been visiting this exhibit, “The Whole World in a Book.”

I knew I’d love spending a few hours studying her quirky, wonderful collection. It is what libraries can do, taking us out of our worlds and into others, even for a moment.

What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was, at this juncture with a new war just launched, entering the Lilly to face one of the 26 known copies of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, known as the Dunlap Broadside.  It is also what libraries can do – surprise us with a book, or document we weren’t expecting. I was awash with emotion about the history of that time, and our time today.

And then, just a room away, a Gutenberg New Testament. I could have spent all day on that alone, but turned to meet a curator who offered a tour of the largest collection of puzzles in the US. Jerry Slocum is known as the world’s greatest puzzle collector, and they are, too, all here at the Lilly, as the Jerry Slocum Collection of mechanical puzzles. And then I fell down the puzzle rabbit hole for a while, a dream day of getting sidetracked at a library.

– Shannon