Acknowledgments

First, my everlasting gratitude to my wife, Maureen, who skillfully read the manuscript many times, organized aspects of the process along the way, and sustained me creatively, practically, and steadily. Her resilience and accuracy have been invaluable. I dedicate this book to her. My son, Andrew, and daughter, Claire, and their families, as always, have in their ways been encouraging witnesses to the progress of this book.

My literary agent in London, David Godwin, through the years has been a source of encouragement, good ideas, friendship, and guidance; and I proffer thanks also to Laura Mamelok, my literary agent in New York, whose careful and practical guidance in later stages has been wonderful.

I could not be more fortunate than I have been in having Anne Savarese as my editor at Princeton University Press, whose support and imagination with so many aspects of the publication process, from beginning to end, has made the whole process go smoothly. I cannot express enough my gratitude to her. This book also benefited hugely from the endlessly discerning thoroughness, accuracy, and sensitivity of Beth Gianfagna, my copy editor, who is surely one of the best. The combined help of Ali Parrington, Thalia Leaf, and Theresa Liu at Princeton University Press has also smoothed the way considerably.

In researching and writing about the dictionary wars, I have benefited from the assistance of the staffs of libraries and archives, and several other institutions and museums. My thanks to the British Academy for a grant enabling me to spend valuable time in the United States at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Library; New Haven Museum and Historical Society; Houghton Library at Harvard University; Harvard University Archives; New York Public Library; Special Collections, Indiana State University Library; Special Collections, Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, Connecticut; Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts; Craigie-Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Boston Public Library; Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston; Cambridge (Massachusetts) Historical Society; and the British Library. My thanks go also to several of those libraries and institutions for permission to quote from material and include in this book certain images as illustrations. In addition, I extend my gratitude to Anita Israel at the Craigie-Longfellow House; Leah Jehan, Anne Marie Menta, and Moira Ann Fitzgerald at the Beinecke at Yale; James W. Campbell, Librarian and Curator of Manuscripts, and Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, Director of Photo Archives, at the New Haven Museum; Sierra Dixon and Karen Li Miller, Connecticut Historical Society; Fred Burchsted, Research Library, Widener Library, Harvard; Dennis Vetrovec and Joshua Stabler, Special Collections, Indiana State University; and Tevis Kimball, Curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst. My gratitude and thanks, too, to John Kulka. For a good deal of information on Lyman Cobb, I am indebted to Charles Monaghan, who sent me several notes and an essay on Cobb without which chapter 7 would have been undernourished. I could mention many more research debts, of course, and readers can find references to them in the text and notes.