The vanishing book

The Oxford English Dictionary is the single most thorough, exhaustive document describing the meanings and etymologies of words in the English language ever written.  The most recent edition -- published in 1989 -- runs to twenty volumes; the next edition is "in process" but is expected to be long enough that "it probably won't ever be printed in full."

Each word's entry not only contains its definition, lexical class, and word origin, but the first-use citation -- a reference stating the first known appearance of the word, with that definition/usage, in print.  (It's not claiming that this is the earliest use of the word; simply that this is the first print attestation known.  For almost all words, you'd expect the actual first use would have been in some unrecorded speech, and therefore wouldn't be verifiable.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dan (mrpolyonymous), OED2 volumes, CC BY 2.0]

So each word -- or, for words with multiple usages or definitions, each one of those -- is accompanied by a citation documenting its first known appearance in print.  Trying to find these is a mammoth task; ever since work began on the OED in 1857, an enormous amount of work has gone into sifting through old manuscripts trying to figure out when and how words first appeared.

But here's where it gets weird.  Because if you look at the first-use citation for fifty words from the OED, you find that their earliest attestation is a book called Meanderings of Memory, published in 1852 in London, by an author known only as "Nightlark."  Some of these words are archaisms or odd usages, but a few are remarkably ordinary -- like extemporize and slippery (as a combinatory form, as in slippery-skinned) and sap (meaning a fool or a dupe).  So naturally, philologists and linguists are eager to give this book a closer examination.

Despite decades of searching, not a single copy of Meanderings of Memory has ever been found, nor do we know the actual name of the author who went by the odd pseudonym "Nightlark."

In fact, nearly all contemporaneous reference works -- library catalogues, literary guides, and the like -- don't mention Meanderings at all.  The only two places other than the OED that it's ever been found are a title-only entry on an 1854 Sotheby's for-sale list, and a bookseller's catalogue from the same year, from a book store in Brighton, that reads:

MEANDERINGS of Memory, by Nightlark, 8vo, boards London, 1852 6s Written and published by a well-known connoisseur with the epigraph "Cur potius lacrimæ tibi mi Philomela placebant?"

The Latin epigraph means "Why do my tears please you more, my Philomela?"  But to add another layer to the mystery -- a search for where that quote came from has also turned up nothing.  The source of the epigraph has proven to be as elusive as the book itself.

The quest for this book has been going on for a long time.  In 1893, a reader of the classified advertising publication The Bazaar, Exchange, and Mart inquired about it, and received the rather snippy answer, "We know nothing about this book, having never heard of it before.  It is probably of little value."  So even by then, whatever copies existed when the OED citations were written might already have vanished.  Further evidence of inquiries occurred intermittently over the next century, but all were fruitless.  In 2013, the OED editors posted a public appeal:

A number of quotations in the OED derive from a book with the title Meanderings of Memory.  However, we have been unable to trace this title in library catalogues or text databases.  All these quotations have a date of 1852, and some cite the author as 'Nightlark'.

The only evidence for this book's existence that we have yet been able to find is a single entry in a bookseller's catalogue.

Have you ever seen a copy of this book?  Can you identify the 'well-known connoisseur' mentioned by the bookseller?

All the replies they got were negative.

So we're left with a mystery -- a book cited fifty times in the best-documented and most thorough work on English philology and etymology ever created, and which is known otherwise only from two brief citations that don't even mention the author's real name.  Some have speculated that it might have been some brief work of doggerel poetry that no one at the time thought might ever be significant; others, that it was pornographic in nature, and offended the easily-bruised sensibilities of the Victorian-era English so badly that all the copies were trashed.  (This might explain the snarky response from The Bazaar, Exchange, and Mart.)  Whatever the actual explanation, it leaves us with a puzzle -- how a book important enough to attract the attention of the literary scholars on the first OED editorial team had utterly vanished, by perhaps as little as forty years later, when a booksellers' newsletter claimed to "know nothing about it."

A lot of people -- especially us authors -- like to think of the written word as permanent.  The truth is that it doesn't take much for even it to vanish, especially works written prior to rapid mechanized printing.  As I described in a post a couple of years ago, there are many ancient authors whose work is known only from fragments, or from a handful of volumes that happened by accident to escape the vagaries of time, or -- in the worst cases -- from the author or work being mentioned in passing elsewhere.  But the story of Meanderings of Memory shows that even more recent works can be just as ephemeral.

It recalls to mind a scene from my novel The Scattering Winds.  It's set six hundred years in the future, in a time when the Earth has been largely depopulated by war and repeated epidemics, and the remaining people are mostly illiterate.  The main character, Kallian Dorn, stumbles upon a library -- a remnant of today's civilization that has somehow managed to survive the ravages of six centuries of chaos, cared for by a handful of people who realize what a treasure they have.

The Librarian let his fingertips brush the nearest row of books.  “You can see the titles of the stories, and the names of the women and men who wrote them, on the spines of the books.  All of those people, and all that’s left of them are their names and the tales they told.”

Kallian’s eyes grew wider and wider as he took it all in, a collection of thousands of stories grander than anything he could have imagined, faded pages bearing the tales of authors from a bygone age.  Who were these people, and what stories did these books contain?  It was more than anyone could read in a hundred lifetimes.  He let his eyes wander over the mysterious-sounding titles, his mind creating pictures of what they might mean, what legends and lore were trapped within those closed covers.

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