We deserve our own, locally produced dictionary." Others have denounced a thoughtless act of "cultural vandalism". Edinburgh, says Martin, "is the first Unesco city of literature. MEP David Martin has declared Chambers so iconic that it should have the same EC protection as Arbroath smokies. Philip Pullman has been lending support behind the scenes. Several MSPs and MPs, including Margo MacDonald, have jumped into battle. Meanwhile, the reaction north of the border to a crisis that has not troubled the cultural conscience of the south has been one of outrage. Darwinian laws operate as ruthlessly in the book world as in any South American jungle.įor those who cherish the historic Franco-Scottish rapprochement, the fate of Chambers must be bitterly ironic.
Squeezed for resources, it failed to adjust to virtual publishing and ended up as part of Hachette UK, itself a subsidiary of the French company Lagardère. Oxford was lucky: it enjoyed charitable status and could invest in its future. As the online revolution gained momentum, reference-book publishers such as OUP took drastic measures to keep up. Reference publishing has been in trouble since the 1980s. A second consolidation in 2007 brought another Victorian treasure, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, into the fold.Īll of this signals just one message. An important part of Chambers's appeal is that it has always been a no-nonsense, one-volume dictionary, without airs and graces.ĭictionaries, as I've implied, are literary artefacts from a self-improving age of quires and hot metal, but Chambers survived against the odds until, early in the 1990s, it merged with the reference company Harrap. It soon became a pillar of Victorian self-help, founded on local scholarship, and renowned for its authority and usefulness. The Scots publisher, Chambers, was established in 1819, in the magnificent afterglow of the Scottish enlightenment, by brothers William and Robert Chambers, who produced their first dictionary in 1867.
0 kommentar(er)
