A friend loaned me this book with a glowing recommendation, and although I lack the means to loan a copy to all of you, I can at least extend a solid recommendation of my own. The Professor and the Madman is a fascinating tale of murder, redemption, and… lexicography?

With the great heights that the English language had reached during Shakespeare’s time and even for a short time after his death, the language lacked any solid rules for spelling. The meaning of words was at the mercy of their context. England needed a dictionary if it was going to spread the glorious English language wherever it flew the Union Jack. After several attempts, most notably by Sam Johnson, a small group of men under the leadership of John Murray took upon themselves the monstrous task of compiling a dictionary with accurate pronunciations, spellings, definitions, and a chronological register of each word’s uses throughout history. The hard-fought product that resulted was the Oxford English Dictionary.

Across the Atlantic, an American military surgeon, William Chester Minor, was losing his mind while serving in the Civil War. He was falling within the grip of mental illness.

Schizophrenia set in and Minor was discharged. Already being a Yale-educated speaker of eight languages, when he encountered the OED project on a leisure trip to London, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to contribute. And W.C. Minor had plenty of time to contribute his 10,000+ entries to the dictionary. He was imprisoned in a mental institution after committing a murder due to a psychotic fit that led to his imprisonment for the rest of his 85-year life.

Winchester’s retelling of this riveting tale is dulled in a few spots by what I found to be the book’s few shortcomings. There were grammar and punctuation errors scattered throughout the novel. My copy was on its second edition and I’d like to think such things would be fixed in subsequent editions.

There were several breaks throughout the text that amounted to five or six lines on some pages. It made the book seem longer than it actually was. The fonts used were also somewhat distracting. Whole pages were disrupted by full-length definitions in the OED’s font. While it’s a neat gimmick the first few times, I was longing for standard indented block quotations by the end. Winchester repeated facts a few times that did not need repeating. This made some parts seem redundant. Some parts seemed to repeat themselves. He said some things over and over in different ways.

Other than those small quibbles, The Professor and the Madman is a great contribution to the growing popular history genre that keeps the story intact even though conservatively fictionalized. In other words, he didn’t pull a “Dan Brown.”