INTRODUCTION
Johnson is engaged in the impersonal task of compiling a dic-
tionary; but he has made that task personal to himself has rooted
himself in the centre of the work that is to be done, partly by the
length and arduousness of his labours but even more so by his
unreserved acceptance of his own destiny as an English man of
letters.
--John Wain, Samuel Johnson (1974)
The first Baker s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians appeared in
1900. Its editor, Theodore Baker, was an American, born in
New York in 1851, who went to Leipzig to do a dissertation
on Native American music. Returning to his homeland in 1890, he
worked for the New York publishing house of G. Schirmer, producing
not only the first edition of Baker s but a second in 1905, among other
books. Nicolas Slonimsky arrived in the 1940s to produce a Supple-
ment to the fourth edition, which appeared in 1949. Taking charge,
he published a completely revised fifth edition in 1958, a sixth in
1978, a seventh in 1984, and an eighth in 1991. Ever larger than its
predecessors, the last has 2115 pages with double columns; containing
approximately two million words, it weighs eight pounds. As a one-
volume compendium, it has no competitors and probably never will.
Some expository writers produce books; others favor essays. A
rare few excel at the art of the entry. What Nicolas Slonimsky
(1894-) shares with Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is the production
具體描述
讀後感
評分
評分
評分
評分
用戶評價
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