WEBSTER'S NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: SECOND EDITION, UNABRIDGED (LEATHERBOUND INDIA-PAPER EDITION) by Webster, Noah - 1948

NEW YORK: Merriam-Webster, 1948. Second Edition. Leather-bound. Near Fine. This is the 1948 printing of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, First issued in 1934 and last printed in 1960 before giving way (in 1961) to the Third Edition. Just one or two insignificant wear spots at extremities and a tiny nick in the leather to bottom edge of front board. One or two lightly-wrinkled preliminary pages. Indisputably, THE premier and still ultimate researcher's dictionary in lovely condition -- a STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS BEHEMOTH -- nicest we've seen in a quarter century or more! Wanna be a writer? Put down your Google, and pick up this Baby; it's the real deal! Size 12" x 9" x 3". Weight 10 lbs. Rich, brown textured leather, with bright gilt lettering to front board and spine. Red and green marbled edges, tab indexed of bright gilt on black. Contains 600,000 Entries; 12,000 Terms Illustrated; 13,000 Geographical Entries. pp. 3210, followed by two pages of advertisements. Its makers write: "Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition is the culmination of a century's experience in dictionary making. For more than 100 years the work of the editorial staff has been continuous... 207 special editors labored ten years to make this a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date reference work to serve today's needs" In (it) "the consultant will find answers to all questions, not only about meanings, but also about spelling, hyphenation, preferred forms, the part of speech to which a word belongs, pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, and multitudes of other problems..." Why this Second Edition is considered preferable to the newer Third Edition The Second, (which is THIS book we're offering) we've been told, is actually preferred by scholars over the Third Edition, due to its strict adherence to correct English, its purportedly greater etymological/philological detail reflecting deeper entry-by-entry scholarship, its superior aesthetic and design sense " Gary Wills in the New Review opined that the new dictionary 'has all the modern virtues. It is big, expensive, and ugly. It should be a great success')" Edited by Philip Babcock Gove, the Third encompassed radical changes which some found unacceptable: "...To make room for 100,000 new words, Gove now made sweeping deletions, dropping 250,000 entries. He eliminated the 'nonlexical matter' that more properly belongs to an encyclopaedia, including all names of people and places (which had filled two appendices). There were no more mythological, biblical, and fictional names, nor the names of buildings, historical events, or art works. Thirty picture plates were dropped. The rationale was that, while useful, these are not strictly about language... Also removed were words which had been virtually out of use for over two hundred years (except those found in major literature such as Shakespeare), rare variants, reformed spellings, self-explanatory combination words, and other items considered of little value to the general reader. The number of small text illustrations was reduced, page size increased, and print size reduced by one-twelfth, from six point to agate (5.5 point) type. All this was considered necessary because of the large amount of new material..." "In the early 1960s, Webster's Third came under attack for its "permissiveness" and its failure to tell people what proper English was. ...as conservatives detected yet another symbol of the permissiveness of society as a whole and the decline of authority, as represented by the Second Edition. As historian Herbert Morton explained, "Webster's Second was more than respected. It was accepted as the ultimate authority on meaning and usage and its preeminence was virtually unchallenged in the United States. It did not provoke controversies, it settled them." Critics charged that the dictionary was reluctant to defend standard English, for example entirely eliminating the labels "colloquial", "correct", "incorrect", "proper", "improper", "erroneous", "humorous", "jocular", "poetic", and "contemptuous", among others..." Further, "...The consensus held that the Third was a "marvelous achievement, a monument of scholarship and accuracy". They did come up with some specific criticisms, including typographic unattractiveness (the type is too small and hard to read); non-use of capital letters (only "God" was capitalized; the goal was to save space); excessive use of citations, giving misspellings as legitimate variants, dropping too many obsolete words, the lack of usage labels, and deliberate omission of biographical and geographical entries.