The Delegates [of the Clarendon Press] never realized what a monkey house their employees made of the Old Ashmolean. How their young male assistants used to keep rushing up the stairs with their latest lexicographical slips to the upper room where shrieks of feminine laughter rewarded their lexicographical discoveries.Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, May 07, 2014
A Monkey House
Robert Gunther (1869-1940), quoted by Christopher Stray, "Dictionary mongers," Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (May 5, 2014):