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Advts: Classifieds | Employment | Obituary | International
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
OXFORD, SEPT. 23. Walk up St. Giles, the great piazza that runs north of St. Mary Magdalen's church here, with St. John's College to your right and the Ashmolean Museum to your left, and before long you come to an inconspicuous Georgian house. Inside is no more glamorous, altogether a light-year from the glitzy modern abode of a multinational book corporation. And yet this is where the publishing achievement of the year — maybe of the decade — has been accomplished. In Brian Harrison's office, arrayed in the simple livery of the Oxford University Press (OUP), dark blue with gold lettering, sits the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). This is a work that makes superlatives superfluous. Running 3.35 metres along the shelf and weighing in at a healthy defensive end's 125 kg, the DNB's 60 volumes contain 60,000 pages and some 60 million words. More than 10,000 contributors have written a total of 54,922 essays on the worthies (as well as the worthless) who make up the fabric of British history.
Major task
It has been more than 12 years in the making. A special batch of indestructible acid-free paper was ordered from a Swiss paper mill. The Butler & Tanner printing works in Somerset were fully occupied for months printing, folding and binding. Each set requires enough sewing thread to go from one end of a football field to the other and back. Mr. Harrison is the editor, and along with Robert Faber, the project director, he explains its 125-year genesis, from the original Dictionary of National Biography, itself one of the grandest feats of Victorian scholarship, and national energy. The English have demonstrated a special flair for reference works, from the Ordnance Survey maps, to the original Encyclopaedia Britannica before it crossed Atlantic, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which William F. Buckley Jr. once called the moon landing of the English people. The OED had a sibling, begot by Sir Leslie Stephen, don, critic, journalist, mountaineer, rowing coach and father of four, one of them Virginia Woolf. With that slightly demonic energy of his age — it was an empty week if he had not written three essays of at least 5,000 words each — he began the DNB. He worked with the publisher George Smith, and Sir Sidney Lee (born Solomon Lazarus), a bachelor scholar, ardent Shakespearean and, in Harrison's view, ``the real hero'' of the first DNB. Between them they produced their vast work between 1885 and 1900. It was updated throughout the 20th century in supplementary volumes, while it passed into the hands of the OUP. In 1992, the editors of the DNB took a deep breath and took the plunge. A fresh start would be made to produce a ``New DNB'' comparable to the Second Edition of the OED published in 1989. Mr. Faber paid tribute to those who had the courage and foresight, notably Colin Matthew, the editor of the Oxford DNB from 1992 until his sudden death at only 58 in 1999, and the historian Sir Keith Thomas, who was chairman of OUP's finance committee when the decision to start afresh was made. An immediate £3 million (about Rs. 25 crores) in seed money was invested, part of it from the British Academy, along with a modest annual £250,000 subsidy from the government. Nobody quite knew then that the total cost of the project would come to more than £22 million (Rs. 182.3 crores), and as Mr. Faber said with a smile, it might not have gone ahead if they had known.
Topics, periods
When the project was sketched out, the whole field of British history was broken down into research topics and into periods, assigned to separate editors, several of them still working in Oxford like Henry Summerson, who dealt with pre-1600; Matthew Kilburn, for the 18th century; and Alex May, for the later 20th. Mr. Harrison, a historian of repute, was enlisted to take over the editorship when Matthew died. Some of the existing essays were judged inferior to begin with, and historical research had made others obsolete. On the whole, shorter and more recent essays have survived, while the longer ones were rewritten: Every British Prime Minister has had a new essay, with some of them — Stuart Ball on Stanley Baldwin and Roy Jenkins on Harold Wilson — being particularly notable. As the essays flowed in (some more punctually than others, Mr. Harrison sharply mentioned), they were edited and computerised. Once every word had been written and edited, keyed and coded, the work of producing the physical object began. With Louise Edwards as production director, typography was settled upon and paper with the right combination of opacity and lightness selected. ``We wanted the volumes to feel like books and not slabs of concrete,'' she said.
The choices
In the compiling of the DNB, most choices were obvious, but there were problems of definition. While the 20th-century volumes included people like Eamonn de Valera, the Irish leader, and Jawaharlal Nehru who had become famous as leaders of independent countries but had spent much of their lives as British subjects, the original DNB ignored the first and most important of all such rebels against the crown. Now America's Founding Fathers are all in. And by the inclusion of people from groups previously neglected, imperial history finds some unlikely heroes. The first black man to be awarded the Victoria Cross was William Hall, the son of freed slaves. (He won the Cross during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which in India is considered the First War of Independence, for storming a mosque held by insurgent forces, which has an uncomfortably contemporary ring.)
Some entertainment
Some essays are sheer entertainment. Like Thomas Jefferson, Pamela Harriman ended as a U.S. citizen and a U.S. ambassador, but she was English by birth. That might or might not account for ``great skill as a mistress,'' says the entry, which ``lay in her malleability.'' While some ill-wishers carped at her behaviour, ``the French were impressed by her looks (which had been improved by time and surgery).'' Other innovations include essays on people who did not exist — the archetypical, like John Bull, or the quasi-mythical, like Robin Hood — along with numerous ``collective biographies'' like Norman Tanner's learned essay on Lollard women. A contributor who toils away over one of these essays, after months of reading, writing, editing and fact-checking, may finally receive a gratifying word of praise from Mr.Harrison — and a cheque for just about enough to buy lunch in one of Oxford's more pretentious pubs. The project would have been impossible if commercial rates were paid to contributors, and no one writes for the DNB for the money. For that matter, no one would publish the DNB for profit. OUP expected to take a loss on the project, and, one of the editors said, ``their expectation is likely to be gratified.'' It is doubtful the likes of the new DNB will ever be seen again. Many public libraries have the old DNB. But the 60 volumes of the Oxford DNB, released on Thursday, retail at the equivalent of Rs. 4. 95 lakhs until November 30, and Rs. 5. 85 lakhs after that. The DNB is also available on CD-ROM, and online at the annual subscription of the equivalent of Rs. 13,275. The electronic versions are designed so that you can look up or cross-reference almost anything. For OUP, the difficulty is that most libraries, let alone individual buyers, are going to prefer the electronic versions. As for the future, it is more than likely that no such work on this scale will ever again be produced in book form. To stand before those 60 volumes may be like waving goodbye to the last Atlantic liner, on a glorious last voyage. -- New York Times News Service
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