Look it Up

In the '60s when I was in high school and living in Manhattan with my grandmother, I frequented two libraries in the area, the Epiphany on 23rd Street, between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, and the Ottendorfer at 135 2nd Avenue, just north of 8th Street, in the St. Mark's neighborhood.

Of the two, the Ottendorfer was my favorite. It was fairly narrow, and had a book-lined mezzanine level that looked so inviting, but was then closed to the public because the flooring wasn't considered safe enough to have perhaps more than one person up there at a time. Very early social distancing.

I checked books out from both libraries, but I also loved to browse, especially at the Ottendorfer, whose history as a branch library dates back to 1884, when it was opened by German immigrants. Both libraries are still part of the NYPL system, and the Ottendorfer is a jewel that I've yet to go back to after so many decades. I think they've opened the mezzanine level at this point.

I will forever remember browsing at the Ottendorfer and finding a chemistry book in German. The library, as originally conceived, served a large German population in the area and had books in both languages. The book probably dated from the '20s or '30s, which when you think of it, was not so long ago when you're in high school in the '60s.

I couldn't get over that there was book, with vellum pages, written in German, filled with formulas for the ceramics industry. Since I was then exposed to high school chemistry, I already knew many of the chemistry books were in German. I still get a kick out of the fact that the periodic table symbol for tungsten is W, for wolfram, a German word. (Okay, I was a geek.)

I knew the St. Marks place area was where the family first settled when they arrived from Greece. My grandfather and his brother started a shoe shine parlor at St. Marks Place. Shoes shined and hats blocked. I don't think they did shoe repair.

What I didn't know at the time I was prowling around the Ottendorfer was that the family lived at 134 2nd Avenue, right above the shoe shine parlor, later flower shop, that would move uptown to 18th street and Irving Place, a cover for the Pete's Tavern Prohibition-era speakeasy in the back, owned by Peter Belles. The family floral business was on three different 18th Street corners until the mid '70s.

What spawned all these memories was the lively obituary written by Sam Roberts about Madeline Kripke, who has just passed away at 76, and was known for being a keeper of a collection of 20,000 dictionaries in her West Village apartment.

And as you'd expect of anyone whose got 20,000 of anything, there is a photo of Ms. Kripke surrounded by parts of her collection. She's an organized looking Collyer brother. There are no parts of cars in her apartment. She is seen holding a 16th century edition of a Latin dictionary, the oldest of her books.

Mr. Roberts, in his swift-moving lede paragraphs recites some examples of the books she accumulated, ending one paragraph with the news that her collection includes a 1980 Transit Authority dictionary guide to pickpocket slang. And that's what reminds me of the German chemistry book at the Ottendorfer library.

Imagine a volume produced for whose use I don't know, of pickpocket slang issued by a city agency. In those days, the Transit Authority had their own police force separate from NYPD, so maybe they needed a dictionary for interrogations, since subways and buses were favorite pickpocket venues. To me, 1980 is not that long ago. In fact, it's further removed from now than that German chemistry book I came across in the '60s.

I'd love to know the words accumulated between the covers of the 1980 edition of pickpocket slang. I can only think of dip, meaning the person doing the nimble-finger lifting. Since many pickpockets of that, and an earlier era, were Gypsies, my guess there is a lot of Romany-type words in there. Gadje, might another one, meaning a non-Gypsy.

Ms. Kripke's love of dictionaries is recalled to have started when she was in fifth grade and her parents gave her Webster's Collegiate dictionary. Growing up in our house we had a small bookcase of books. No family Bible, but a very well-thumbed, falling apart American Collegiate dictionary that was my mother's. It's long shorn of its dust jacket. In fact, I can never remember one. The only examples of her handwriting I have are nestled in notes between some of the pages.

I still have the dictionary, but have long left it alone in a bookcase and use Webster's II New Collegiate dictionary, or one of the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English English dictionary I keep on my desk.

The shorter OED checks in with a two volume width of 5½ inches. I get the biggest kick of the fact that the two volumes are called Shorter, and that the full-Monty would be 20 volumes or so. Of course there is the online version, but that's cheating as far as I'm concerned. The mantra growing up was "look it up." The counter-intuitive advice was always, "you'll know how to spell if you look it up." "But what if I can't spell it? 'Look it up, you'll get close, then you'll know.'" It did work.

I forever remember being in maybe third or fourth grade and the teacher handed out dictionaries to all the pupils. Hard red covers. No dust jackets. That was some thirty-two books. She walked us through the parts of the dictionary. We looked up the word "candid." And yes, aardvark is the first animal named in the dictionary.

Not that long ago I sat in the main reading room of the NYPL Main Branch on 5th Avenue with my daughter Susan and we were quietly reviewing something she was writing for her Master's thesis. I was helping her with her wording. She has since advanced, through dad's influence or not, to write her Ph.D. dissertation with no input from me.

But in that NYPL-dad-moment I remember looking at the huge dictionaries that you'd find on their plinths, open and inviting someone to look something up. I remember, I want that as well. So, I built my own dictionary holder for my smaller Collegiate dictionary.

I also remember looking up at the main reading room's ceiling that is nearly the size of a football field and thought of Thomas Wolfe's words he once wrote about the old Pennsylvania Station..."Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time."

I still would rather look things up in a hard copy dictionary than Google it. I just used my smaller dictionary to make sure the spelling I used for "shorn" that didn't pass the hidden version of Spell Check that this text gets subjected to, was not misspelled. It wasn't.

There was a recent repeat episode of Endeavour, the prequel to the Morse murder mysteries on PBS, that was titled Pylon. The main story was about finding how a young girl was murdered and placed next to a high tension wire tower.

So why was the title Pylon? Well, the OED's fourth definition of the word of the five it gives tells us: A tall structure erected as support: spec. a lattice-work metal tower for overhead electricity. The  OED even adds an example of the word used in a text: "Scotland on Sunday. Cables underground can cost more than overhead pylons". So there.

Mr. Roberts reports there were no plans made by Ms. Kripke for who gets the collection. Her only survivor is a brother, who no doubt will work with those interested parties (they were will be many) who will find a home for the collection.

Libraries are currently closed, but I have every intention of trying to see what's in that 1980 Transit Authority guide to pickpocket slang. It's got to be more up-to-date than the 1811 Edition of: The Vulgar Tongue: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence: Unabridged from the Original 1811 Edition. The original edition I have no doubt is in Ms. Kripke's collection as well.

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