An Interview with John Morse, Part 1
Hosted by Emily Brewster and Peter Sokolowski.
Produced in collaboration with New England Public Media, with much gratitude to John Voci.
Download the episode here.
Transcript
John Morse: If you're going to be a lexicographer, the only way we survive the harmless drudgery is because at heart we're in love with language.
Emily Brewster: Welcome to a very special episode of Word Matters. I'm Emily Brewster. In this three-part episode, Peter Sokolowski and I interviewed John Morse, who retired as president and publisher of Merriam-Webster in 2016 after a long career starting out as a lexicographer and later shepherding the company through periods of enormous change. His story provides insights into publishing in general and lexicography in all its detail-oriented specificity. We learned a lot from this conversation, and if you like words, books, and different ways that books about words are made, you'll want to join us for these behind-the-scenes conversations.
Peter Sokolowski: How did you get into the dictionary business in the first place?
John Morse: Well, two pieces to it. First, I am the son of two librarians and the brother of a third. So I was sort of the rebel of the family that I didn't become a librarian, but it was just sort of one step off in alphabetical order. I became a lexicographer instead. I think my father probably would've liked to have seen me become a librarian like my brother, but he seemed to take a certain amount of comfort in at least I went into reference publishing and that felt a little bit more library-like. Both of my parents were librarians, but they're two different kinds of librarians, and the difference really showed up pretty early in their courtship when my father revealed to my mother that he really enjoyed the cataloging part of library science and my mother said, "Ugh, I hated that. I was never good at cataloging at all," and it really was kind of the difference between them. Cataloging is a very analytical activity. It requires accurate description in a very systematized way, and he took to that very well. My mother just loved reading, and her real love, although she worked in a number of special library situations, I think what she loved the most was just being on the desk at a public community library. There was sort of both sides. There was the love of language coming from my mother and from her father, both of whom read to me as a young person, and I will always just say, I think, for anyone, if you want to be a success in life, have your parents or grandparents read to you. I think that's just key to it. But then on the other side, that very analytical part of it, which I think was good training for becoming a lexicographer. I mean, the activity of cataloging a book is not that far off from what we do when we frame our definitions.
Emily Brewster: That's interesting because it makes me think about how to be a lexicographer, you really do have to be analytical, but you also have to love the language enough to tolerate the activity of actual defining.
John Morse: Yes, that's right, and you have to work in that very regimented way that a dictionary definition is constructed. At one point when we did the keyboarding of W3, and we'll get to this in a while, the typist input the information into a very set template that was constructed in such a way that home workers working at home with just a pile of paper and a laptop with uncanny degree of accuracy, about 99.98, I think, or maybe 99.96, got all of the SGML tags right around all of the data elements, and it's because it is such a rule-bound way we do this. Well, so is the catalog card, if you think about it. I mean, there's a place for the main entry, there's a place for the author, there's a place for the title, there's a place for the description, there's a place for the pages. It is a template of information, and I think I always liked that. Like a lot of people, I'm sort of in love with card catalogs, and it was because you could just see the structure of the information, not by labeling it, but simply by virtue of its typeface and its position on the card, you know what kind of information that is. And we try to do the same thing in a dictionary, particularly in the print world. We don't label what all of that information is. We don't say, "This is the main entry, this is the functional label, this is the this." It's all based on typography and position on the page.
Emily Brewster: That's right. It's a meta-language of typography and positioning.
John Morse: Right. So I think that from my father, I got a kind of predilection for a term that he used a lot in his library work: information storage and retrieval. How do we gather information? How do we store the information and how do we retrieve the information? But on my mother's side, I think I got the real love, pure love for language. And I think if you're going to be a lexicographer, you have to do both. The only way we survive the harmless drudgery is because at heart we are in love with language, and I think that's what really I got from my mother. Although, I have to say my father had a perverse love of language that manifested itself in loving puns of all kinds, and it was from him that I heard the pun about, and I was reminded of it recently, because there was a new award-winning blueberry that was grown someplace that was the biggest blueberry that's ever been grown. I'm hearing this on the radio. I think of a blueberry the size of a grapefruit or something. And it put in mind the story of someone else who had just grown a prize-winning berry, and the world's expert on berries hears about this, who's not only an expert, but a bit of a collector of berries himself, and he wants to go see this berry. And the people who have it are a little worried that maybe he might just steal their berry when he gets there because he'd likes to have a collection. So he gets there and there are all kinds of security precautions in place to keep him from grabbing the berry. And he says, "No, no, no. There's no need to worry. I've come to praise your berry, not to seize it." My father loved that.
Peter Sokolowski: Not to seize it. Right, of course.
John Morse: I loved that pun.
Peter Sokolowski: But that also assumes so much knowledge that you know that line of Shakespeare, and then by inverting those syllables, the dictionary editor has to kind of recognize the culture in the language.
John Morse: Yes. On the more popular side of that, we grew up in Philadelphia, and so Atlantic City was fairly close by, and we would take little vacations in Atlantic City off season because the rates would've been too high, but off season, in October and March or April, we could stay at one of the grand hotels on the boardwalk. And since it was off season, there wasn't a lot of things to do, but after dinner we would always go out and walk on the boardwalk. And one night as we were walking along, there were a lot of billboards on the boardwalk, and we were walking along and just seeing the backside of the billboard. You could see coming up over the top of the billboard, two shiny red lighted areas, and we couldn't figure out what it was. My brother and I are fairly young at this point, so we can't figure out right away, why are these glowing red spots on the top of the billboard? As we get a little closer and closer, I begin to come up with kind of a guess, which is there are lighted letters on the other side of this billboard and we're just kind of seeing the tops of those letters. My brother still is utterly confused, "Why are these red lights sitting on top of the back of the billboard?" We get all the way up, and it's now a long walk at night on the boardwalk, and get to the other side of the billboard and look back at it, and indeed there's a big red sign that says Budweiser, and that's what we were seeing. We were seeing the top of the capital B and the ascender on the D. My brother looks a little crestfallen and my father looks at him and said, "You're now a sadder Budweiser person." I told that story at his memorial service, and a whole meeting house full of somber Quakers broke up and started laughing.
Peter Sokolowski: So they know musicals as well, but that's fantastic. But yeah, in other words, there's a playfulness, and maybe that is sometimes forgotten, but dictionary editors to be good at their jobs have to care deeply about language, which means often that they have read a lot and they've heard a lot and they like poetry and literature. And that maybe goes unspoken sometimes, but it's an important element in our background.
John Morse: Well, I'll share one other element on this topic. The paragraph that I am most proud to be associated with in any book we've ever published is the first paragraph of the preface to Encyclopedia of Literature, and if you haven't read it, you should. I'm going to share with you and I think this is just perfect. It says: It is through the naming of objects, the telling of stories, and the singing of songs that we know ourselves and others. Whether trickster tales or nursery rhymes are the first things we remember hearing, we have learned how to live our lives by means of narrative. The stories our mothers told us, the books our brothers and sisters read to us, and the volumes we chose to read to them, the Holy Books and the textbooks we memorized as children and still recall with perfect clarity: by these means, we develop, however weakly or strongly, our moral natures. We discover who we are and who we are not, what we would give anything to be, and precisely what we would be willing to sacrifice to gain that prize. We need stories and songs to live fully. A lovely paragraph, but I think to what we're saying, that's why we are so in love with language. In fact, one of the little speaking tours I did, and I think it was around 2001, or 2000, where they're coming at the millennium, we did a words of the millennium speaking tour, and I suggested calling, and we did a line that comes from a passage that Rita Dove, the former poet laureate of the United States, had written about her writing process and how when she writes, she pulls out a thesaurus, she thinks about words, she thinks about their sound, thinks about their rhythm, and she ends up sort of saying, "In order to be a writer, you have to have a shameless love of language." We called the tour at that point, "a shameless love of language," because, again, I think that's what gets you through the drudgery and the hard work, is the shameless love of language. So all of that I think really to say that's the part that I think I got from my parents.
Peter Sokolowski: And you went on to be an English major, is that right?
John Morse: I went on to become an English major and then I kind of let myself loose for a few years after graduating from Haverford and thought I would become a writer and tried to be a writer. I ended up being a taxi driver instead and also spent some time working in another library and, with my future wife, spent about nine months simply driving around the country and being a tourist. But eventually it occurred to me, "John, you can't spend your life doing this and you need to kind of find your way back to the civilized world." And the way I did that was to go back to graduate school and I went and enrolled at the University of Chicago at the recommendation of a friend of mine who also thought he was going to become a writer and decided to go back to the civilized world and decided to go to University of Chicago. One of the untold stories that someone should tell is of how many working lexicographers during our generation went through the University of Chicago. Jim Rader on our own staff was University of Chicago, Jesse Sheidlower was University of Chicago, Erin McKean's University of Chicago, Ben Zimmer's University of Chicago.
Emily Brewster: It is a very significant number of lexicographers.
Peter Sokolowski: It's an amazing nexus. It's almost bizarre how specific it is.
John Morse: One of the reasons I think for that is that historically the English department at the University of Chicago has a particular kind of literary theory that it pursues. In fact, I think of the History of Literary Theory and Criticism, called the Chicago School of Criticism, and it is very Aristotelian in its orientation and very much moves you towards inductive thinking rather than deductive thinking. When you say something about a work of literature, it's not because you know that it's French or it's 18th century or the author was this or the genre was this, and you don't look at the piece of literature as a specific instance of a generalization. Instead, you start pulling the piece of literature apart piece by piece, and from those specific pieces of information, you draw a generalization about the work of literature. So you're not working from the general to the specific, you're always working from the specific to the general, and that gives you, I think, a very rigorous and, again, analytical approach to looking at a piece of literature. Well, it's exactly what we do in Lexicography. We don't say, "Well, this word comes from Greek roots, so it must be this," or "This word is an adverb, so it must do this." We look at the specific instances. "Well, this word was used this way on March 31st and this day on January 2nd, and in this particular context; our definition is a generalization based on those specifics and not a specific application of a generalization. It's not surprising to me that so many of us at the University of Chicago, I think in a way inadvertently, I don't know how many of us went to the University of Chicago thinking we were going to become a lexicographer. I think Erin did.
Emily Brewster: I think Erin did.
John Morse: But after I say Erin, I have a feeling that the rest of us may well have discovered. I mean, I think Ben actually got an anthropology degree. Lexicography is kind of a found profession and it's not something that you start out trying to do. So I think the University of Chicago was useful from that intellectual point of view. My time at University of Chicago, the real gift was that when I got out to Chicago the summer before I was going to begin my studies, I wanted to find a summer job in order to pay for this education, and my friend who had gotten there first said, "Oh, I know a job because I'm going to do it, too. Encyclopedia Britannica is hiring people to work on a project called The Microbook Library of English Literature." And the Microbook Library of English literature was to create a library of English literature on microfilm at first, but once we had it on microfilm, it was then further reduced to create microfiche, and then further reduced to create ultramicrofiche. And ultramicrofiche was a way they had of taking microfilm pages and putting 1,000 images on a three-by-five piece of plastic.
Emily Brewster: Wow.
John Morse: That was high technology in 1976.
Emily Brewster: And certainly a precursor to Google Books.
John Morse: Yes.
Emily Brewster: Right? This is very much in that vein.
John Morse: And the idea particularly of doing this was that if you were a junior library or some small library that needed to get your library up to accreditation, you could buy this product, and in a couple of shoe boxes we could deliver to you, you had a really robust library of English literature going from its origins up to 20th century copyright, because we didn't want to try to get rights to everything in the 20th century. In order to do that, and to get them in the most significant editions, a group of scholars was commissioned by Encyclopedia Britannica to say, "What are the most important works of Dickens we ought to have, and what are the best editions for us to have?" And then teams of what I was, a searcher collator, would go to an academic library, find that particular book in that particular edition, and deliver it to a filming crew that was set up outside the library, or in some cases in the basement of the library, who would have a step-and-repeat camera and would cradle the 17th or 18th century original edition to take the original image, and then it would go off to a laboratory and be reduced and reduced and reduced.
Emily Brewster: Wow. Would you call the library ahead of time and find out which editions they had?
John Morse: As a matter of fact, what Britannica did was it made arrangements with three libraries, and we just sort of moved in for the summer, and each book that we were looking for had a big card, five-by-eight card, and those five-by-eight cards were distributed to the three teams according to what the best bet of the supervisors to where we would find those books. There was a team at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. There was a team at the University of Chicago and there was a team at the Newberry Library, and that's where I got to go.
Peter Sokolowski: Oh.
John Morse: So I spent the summer of 19-
Emily Brewster: I don't know the Newberry Library.
John Morse: It is a gorgeous private library in Chicago that just has a collection that would take your breath away.
Peter Sokolowski: And a major collection of early modern books, very famous for-
Emily Brewster: Wow.
John Morse: Also books about Native Americans and some other very notable collections.
Emily Brewster: So were your parents and your brother exceedingly jealous at this point that you got to go to this library for your summer job?
John Morse: I think they did know in my own way I was beating them at their own game, yes.
Emily Brewster: "Look at the summer gig I got."
John Morse: Look at the summer gig I got. So we would go to the catalogs at the library and look at all of the books we were supposed to find. Once we found them, we had to confirm that, yes, indeed, this is the exact edition that the scholars have told us we should get. And then we had to do a collation of all of the pages in the book so later, whoever inspected the film would know that the film operator had gotten every page right because what they got matched what we told them they were supposed to get. And then a duplicate of that film went back to Britannica's headquarters where a cataloger would write the catalog cards for all those works because here was the deal: if you were the library getting this, you not only got the complete set of fiche, but you also got a complete set of catalog cards for every book that we had put on ultramicrofiche, and the cataloging was just elegant. Every opportunity for creating a tracing, another subject card, or alternative author card or alternative title card was there. So this was going to be the most accessible collection that you could possibly have. I fell in love with this job, and not just for what we were doing, but it was a galvanizing moment in my life because this is a complex project. We have got film technicians, we've got graduate students who are acting as the searcher collators, we've got trained librarians who are creating the catalog cards. We're also going to typeset a bound catalog, and the typesetting is going to get done inside Britannica's electronic typesetting department. So there's a typesetting element to this. There's a computer element to this. There's a lot of complexity, and I saw that complexity and I sensed in my bones that I understood it, and I knew what it would take to make it work. So even though I was at the lowest level of the organization, I saw it with a kind of clarity that sometimes successful baseball hitters will talk about seeing the ball coming to them and it looks to them as big as a grapefruit and it's going to be easy to hit. I just saw this project with a kind of clarity. Then I felt a great sense of responsibility to make sure that not only our little operation at the Newberry was doing well, but that we could help the other teams and the other libraries do well as well, and I could even kind of make some suggestions to the people who were organizing the project back at the Britannica building. And I sort of knew I really was hooked at one point when I was talking to a friend of mine who was doing his residency at a local hospital in Chicago. And so we were crossing paths and he recounted a night when things in the hospital had gone very badly, and it was just a bit of chaos. He wasn't there, but he heard stories about how things went so badly in the hospital that night. He said, "Boy, I'm glad I wasn't there to see that happen." And I realized, although I didn't say it to him, I realized, I now have just the opposite reaction. If someone had said, "Over the weekend we were trying to film and things went badly at Newberry," I was like, "Boy, I wish I was there," because if I had been there, maybe I could have prevented things from going so badly. And in fact, what I was trying to do, I succeeded at. When I got involved with it, we were in sort of phase two of working our way through the chronology of English literature. So we were on Restoration to 1660 to 1784 maybe. I kind of forget exactly where the dividing line was. I want to say there was a particular work of literature that was our dividing point, and then we went ahead after that and did the rest of the 19th century. And at that point I was moved from being the temporary part-time searcher collator to assistant editor of the project, and eventually, although the title stayed the same, pretty much ran the last days of the project.
Emily Brewster: Were you a graduate student then? Because this was your summer job?
John Morse: This was my summer job. Then I kept it as a part-time job during the academic year. I was really so hooked on this that I said, "I'm going to take the master's degree and we're going to call that quits." I knew I was learning more about English literature at Britannica than I was at University of Chicago. I'd kind of gotten what I wanted. I reconnected with the world, I'd found a job, I'd had a good time in graduate school. So I quit after a year and then went full time for Britannica for the next year and a half or so, finishing up this project. At the time I graduated from the University of Chicago, I wasn't sure that the Britannica job was going to stay. So I did talk to their guidance department about finding another job, spent some time with the person who was trying to find jobs for graduates. He said, "Well, I usually ask people, what would be your idea of the perfect job? But you've already had it." It was that project that just made me understand that, first off, I really liked making things and I knew that I could work well with others. I got a sense from that variety of people who are working, technicians and librarians and computer people and graduate students, I sort of understood what it is that you need to say to people to get them to be good at their own jobs and how to make it very clear what it is that they could do to be successful and how we could arrange a project with minimum of inefficiencies and enough clarity that people could see their way through it clearly. It was very clear that I was in this world to make things and to lead people.
Emily Brewster: How old was the relationship between Britannica and Merriam-Webster at this point? Can you describe that relationship a little bit?
John Morse: Britannica bought Merriam-Webster in 1964, and the reason being that up until then, Merriam-Webster was privately held, closely held. There were some outstanding shares that actually traded on the Philadelphia Baltimore Stock Exchange, but it was closely held mostly by members of the family, and a lot of them were getting on in years and needed more income. Merriam had just gone through a hard period getting the unabridged out, so the profits were not great during the investment period in Webster's Third. Obviously, once Webster's Third came out, it did sell well, well enough that someone would be interested in acquiring the company, but still a lot of the elderly shareholders wanted to get out. So Britannica came in and bought it. For the most part, pretty much left it alone. Merriam was then, as it is now, a very profitable company. I think Britannica was able to borrow the money to buy Merriam-Webster, and then Merriam-Webster was able to pay back all of that loan out of his own profits. So essentially, Britannica sort of got it for free and was pretty happy with that because there was a nice business synergy there. Merriam-Webster is a cash business. If you're Barnes & Noble, you buy the dictionary today and you pay within 90 days, and we have the money. Britannica was more of an installment business because people did not pay for that encyclopedia right away. A lot of them were on a payment plan, which meant that if Britannica had a really good year, it had to print a lot of encyclopedias, but it wasn't necessarily going to get paid for them. So to have a reliable cash source to offset their cash flow was advantageous. They were fundamentally happy with that relationship, and there was not a lot of moves to make a lot of changes, but there was in terms of top leadership. So what I was doing in 1980 was not that peculiar, and it probably felt a little peculiar inside the editorial department, but it was not a peculiar thing to have happen. So Jim said to me, "There's an opening here and you should apply for," and things worked at Merriam's usual pace, and about a year or so later, I was at Merriam-Webster.
Peter Sokolowski: Just for context, Merriam-Webster has a peculiar editorial culture, and most of us, I say us because Emily and I kind of are among these, are people who sort of start there and stay and have a long period of time of growing up within the department and within the very peculiar rules of Merriam-Webster defining whatever it is. But then you absorb those rules and it becomes very much kind of a family. And in fact, in my time, I just remember there was one editor, a senior editor, who came in from outside, two actually, but one was lexicographer, the other was not lexicographer, and they were very important colleagues and much beloved, but they were the only two who are not from our in-house system of growing with the job and growing with the style of Merriam-Webster.
John Morse: But it made perfect sense to me. And when I came out for my interview at one point, probably in '78 or '79, I walked through the front door of Merriam-Webster and I knew, "This is the place for me." And particularly when I got up to the second floor. This was a warm day in September, and the windows were open, and holy Jesus, this is actually a place where there are open windows. And still at that point, the library was where the citation files are, and the citation files were where the library is. So it smelled like a library, it had windows open, and it was a building that clearly was built in the 1930s. So-
Emily Brewster: And very quiet, like a library?
John Morse: Quiet like a library, which didn't shock me at all. I mean, I know we get other visitors to Merriam-Webster and they all go, "Boy, it's so quiet in here." I didn't notice.
Peter Sokolowski: It felt like home.
John Morse: Felt like home.
Peter Sokolowski: Wow.
John Morse: This is a library. And I think other people do have that kind of feeling. I mean, they just get here and they know this is what they want. And I used to sit with interviews when Fred was interviewing candidates for editorial positions, and he always had a line. You probably heard it as well, saying that, "If you take this job, you have to understand that you're going to come here and you're going to do pretty much the same job, sitting at the same chair by yourself day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year." You could see people's faces. Some of them are going, "Get me out of here," and others are just getting a dreamy look on their face that "I could just sit at a desk and do the same job forever?"
Emily Brewster: I remember that line. I remember it felt like he was impressing on me the idea that I might be truly miserable-
John Morse: Right.
Emily Brewster: ... so that I could deeply consider that and then make a decision. And yes, some people run away, yes, and the rest of us stick around.
John Morse: In general, it's been the case that if people are not happy, they're going to leave within the first year. And if they stay past the first year, with some notable exceptions, there's a really high chance we're going to be able to keep with them for five, 10, 15, 20 years.
Peter Sokolowski: Well, it's also nowhere else to go to do this kind of work.
Emily Brewster: Well, people shift to other fields.
John Morse: Yes.
Emily Brewster: Yeah.
John Morse: We have lost a number of our pronunciation or etymologists to the clergy. That is one place that people can go. A number of people have gone back to teaching.
Emily Brewster: We've had a couple lawyers. People leave to go to law.
Peter Sokolowski: Some people go to law school. Several got to law.
John Morse: Right.
Peter Sokolowski: Some people just go to grad school. They were in their 20s, and they move on.
John Morse: But if you compare it to what was going on during the writing of Webster's Third with a much more stable department, Gove spent almost all of his time during Webster's Third bringing in new lexicographers because he was losing them so quickly. I'm not exactly sure the why of that, but I do know that they were driving those editors pretty hard. And I found one report from Gove to I guess the president of the company that I shared with Peter at one point. It's almost heartbreaking because Gove was such an analytical guy and such a stubborn and determined person. He was not a real people person, and he didn't seem to be the most empathetic, but he knew at some point that he had just pushed his staff about as far as you could push. And he says that to the president of the company at the time, and he says, "I don't mean this to be a complaint, and I don't even mean this to be a call to any kind of action, but I think I have a responsibility to tell you that I think we have pushed these people hard." And then there's just a one very brief sentence that says, "They are tired." It was a tougher time. But I also think there probably was some societal reasons for why that was going on.
Emily Brewster: And this is Philip Gove, who was the editor in chief of Webster's Third International Dictionary, which was a huge, huge editorial undertaking.
John Morse: Huge editorial undertaking.
Emily Brewster: How many thousands of editorial hours were involved in making it? It's in the preface. I don't remember exactly, but it was great pressure on them to complete this project in a particular amount of time, and no one was being paid very much, probably. Lexicographers are famously not rich.
John Morse: Right. And they're trying to just maintain a bigger staff than we were ever trying to maintain. I suspect that's probably why there was so much turnover. The local area, and they were still recruiting just mostly from the local area, probably only produces so many people who are really going to thrive in that environment. And if you're trying to have a department of 50 or 60 people, it's probably going to be hard to maintain those levels. But I also think it was more demanding work, or maybe there was just more drudgery and less love of language at that point.
Emily Brewster: I have an anecdote that I feel like I should tell you, and it's very quick. At one point I was looking through the files and I found a pink. It was some entry. I don't remember what the entry was that I was going to address an issue. And so I went to see if there were any pinks about it, and there was a pink about it saying, "We should revise this entry. We should expand it in this particular way." And the person who received the pink wrote on it, "Yes, but I'm not getting paid enough," and put it back in the drawer. And that was that.
Peter Sokolowski: I'd love to find that one. We have a system of filing with different colors, several different colors, and pink is the color for a query or correction, often to a dictionary that's already in print, and it's a way to fix problems. It's also a way to suggest solutions. And there are different colors. Whites are for citations and buff colors are for definitions and blues are for author quotations. Though we had different kind of color coding in our filing system.
John Morse: It is the record of how many of the entries got constructed. It's a remarkable collection of commentary about the creation of our entries. And with it, we've been able to tell some wonderful stories, if you know how to read the code of the pinks and what the various colors ink means and the stamps mean and the used and et cetera.
Emily Brewster: A pink is often the start of a conversation.
John Morse: It's the start of a conversation.
Emily Brewster: One person raises an idea, says, "Should we address this?" or "Here is how we could address this." And then someone else responds and says, "No, let's do it like this," and then these things can go back and forth over months or years.
John Morse: So in a way, the pinks kind of anticipate email and they anticipate Slack because that was the way we communicated with each other four times a day. If you had a concern about something, you put it, usually, on a pink addressed to a particular person, which is always in the upper right-hand corner about a particular entry, which is always in the upper left-hand corner. And if you had that concern, you wrote it on a pink, you put it in your outbox, and then clerks would come around four times a day, pick up whatever was in your outbox and take it to the person you addressed it to and put into your inbox whatever pinks had been addressed to you, and then you would respond and put it back out.
Peter Sokolowski: Amazing.
John Morse: And so four times a day, there was going to be a communication that was email-like. You had to express yourself quite briefly because you were on a three by five slip of paper.
Emily Brewster: And this is not because we're misanthropes. This is not because we don't want to talk to one another either. It's because you do not want to interrupt a lexicographer who is in the act of defining.
John Morse: Right. You do not want to be the visitor from Porlock showing up to disturb a train of thought. So it's like email, and that was a way of communicating fairly efficiently. The person was going to see it within a few hours, and you might well get a response back within a few hours. But also it's like Slack in that it was all on the same pink so you could see the conversation that emerged over the course of a couple of days.
Peter Sokolowski: All editors had date stamps. You would stamp it so you would see the date of every response.
John Morse: There may have been something like this going when the OED was in progress. I don't know that it was. I have a feeling that we have got, at 47 Federal Street, the most complete record of how lexicographers make their decisions about entries. It is a remarkable archive of lexicographical thinking and understanding the evolution of entries from the 1909 edition of the Unabridged right up to the 11th collegiate.
Emily Brewster: A hundred years. It was a solid 100 years, just under.
John Morse: It is a remarkable resource, and I think we really have only scratched the surface. Peter's done some other things of looking into how we have come to the wording of the definition that we have. And I remember a couple of entries where you and I went back and looked at all of the pinks and reconstructed, "What was the thinking that went into getting the entry the way it is?" We should do more of that, or invite scholars to do more of that because it is the history of dictionary making up close.
Peter Sokolowski: And there's a lot of these cards in the file just for scale, something like 16 million slips of paper that are in these card catalogs that all occupy part of the floor of the editorial floor. So it's a real physical presence as well, long rows of files. And on top of them are these long rows of books, often sets of books, encyclopedias or whatever, that have the same kind of spines or the soldierly rows of books on top of the rows of files, but it does lend a kind of library-like atmosphere to the space as well. But anyway, that gets you to Springfield, and I'm particularly interested in something that I think people take for granted, which is that paperback books weren't part of the program, or at least part of the in-house program when you arrived. And yet, I would've thought paperback books are the kind of heart and soul of a publisher.
John Morse: Right. You would. When I arrived at Merriam-Webster, to be clear, we published hardcover print products designed for native speakers of English to be sold in domestic markets. One of the things that I was dedicated to doing, and I think the company in general, was expanding on all three of those variables to say, and not just print, but we're going to have print and digital, not just for native speakers, for native speakers and language learners, not just for the domestic US market, but also for international markets. And over the course of my time, I think you can sort of imagine that as three and x, y, and z axis, we radiated out from that one spot there to try to create learners products for international markets in digital form. But yes, when I got there, paperbacks are kind of a complicated history. They really only start emerging in the 1930s and the so-called paperback revolution, and I think it's Robert de Graff who founded Pocket Books, who's really responsible for the concept of selling a lot of books at very low prices. I forget what his first publishing forays were, but I think maybe I'm going to say something like Wuthering Heights or something, but the works of English literature, and he was able to sell them for 25 cents a copy. And the way he was doing that was not just because these were on cheap groundwood paper and paper bound, but because he was going to sell them in huge quantities. And by having these huge print runs, then the per-volume cost would go way down. Well, here was the problem in the United States. At the time he was creating this, in the 1930s, there were about 1,700 bookstores in the United States, and that's not enough to support those kinds of volumes. So he had the insight to say, "Let's not sell these paperback books as if they're books. Let's sell them as if they're magazines." And so they got a magazine model. So now he was going to put books into newsstands and grocery stores and airports, and every place that magazines are sold were going to sell books. And I think by doing that, within just a few years, he was selling books in 70,000 different locations.
Emily Brewster: Wow.
John Morse: In doing so, he moved it from being like a book publishing company to being like a magazine publishing company, where you would have distributors who would go to a newsstand or a grocery store or a drug store, and they called them rack jobbers. And they would go to the racks and they would pluck off the last week's magazine and put in this week's magazine. And with books, they would pluck out the slow sellers or restock the good sellers. If you were publishing mass-market paperback books, you weren't selling to the normal bookstores. You were selling to these independent distributors who had these jobbers on trucks driving around the city, putting books into racks. That's why all the mass-market paperbacks were of uniform trim size, because they had to go into the specific racks. So it was a very different kind of selling, and most publishers, Merriam included, didn't try to do it themselves. They licensed the rights to someone who could do it well. And we in fact did the license with Pocket Books. What got us into the business, and we've told this story on the website a few times, was World War II. And during World War II, there was a program called Armed Forces Editions of Books. It was probably the biggest book giveaway in the history of books. The government sponsored printing hundreds of thousands of copies of books, whether it was biographies or histories or novels or westerns or detective stories to give out to soldiers in World War II. One of the most popular books that they distributed was the Merriam-Webster paperback dictionary, which we had created for this Armed Forces Edition program by taking the smallest hardcover dictionary we had, Webster's Little Dictionary or something like that, and creating a paperback printing of this smallest dictionary we had. And it was a huge success. It was one of, I think, the most distributed books in the Armed Forces Edition program. So coming out of the war, I think, and I wasn't there, but I'm just concluding that the people at Merriam-Webster said, "Boy, we ought to keep doing this," and they did the deal with Pocket Books, and in 1947, the first Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary comes out, and it's an immediate success. A million copies in the first year, a million copies in the second year, and with that, we were in the paperback business. But again, not trying to use our own sales force to sell them. We wrote the text. I think we might even have been responsible maybe for type setting, although I'm not sure about that. But certainly all the printing and the binding and the distribution was all handled by Pocket Books. After we had the dictionary out, we added a thesaurus to that at some point after 1976. I'm not quite sure when. And then we added the Scrabble at some point after 1978. So by the time I got to Merriam-Webster, there were three mass market paperbacks that were essentially authored by Merriam-Webster, but sold by Pocket Books. I think we also tried to do some line extension. I think there was an attempt to have a word history book and a guide to synonyms. You could find them around the office, but I don't think they were that successful. So it was just those three core titles that we had when I arrived to license to Pocket Books. During the '80s, there was a lot of buying and selling of publishing companies and changing of ownership and acquisitions. And Simon & Schuster ended up owning both Pocket Books and Prentice Hall, which had the rights to sell Webster's New World Dictionary. So Bill Llewellyn, the president of Merriam-Webster at the time, looked at that situation and said, "I don't like this, that Simon & Schuster is supposed to be selling our book, but they're also selling Webster's New World. I think there's some conflict of interest here." So he reverted the license, and that was an unheard of thing to do for a trade publisher to revert the paperback license. And the president of Simon & Schuster got on the phone to Bill Llewellyn and just read him the riot act and just told him, "You can't do this. You're never going to succeed. You're going to fail terribly. You don't know how to publish paperback books. We know how to do this. Stay in your lane. Do what you're supposed to do." But he had met his match with Bill Llewellyn, who was another very stubborn individual, and we proceeded on a bumpy fashion to become our own paperback publisher. One of the other problems, and the reason why the businesses were often separated, is there was a feeling amongst publishers that you can't give both the paperback line and the hardcover line to the same sales force, because if the salesperson shows up at Barnes & Noble and says, "I have these Collegiate dictionaries over here and these paperback dictionaries over here," there's a good chance that the person's going to say, "Well, I'll take the paperbacks," and that the salesperson, in the interest of getting a sale, will figure, "Well, all right, that's easier to sell the paperbacks. Let's sell the paperbacks." And you can't get the same salesperson to push both lines with equal fervor. It turns out that's not true, as I think we managed to ultimately prove that our one unified sales force could indeed sell the hardcover and paperback at the same time, but it was received wisdom that you couldn't really do that. So as somewhat of a concession to that received wisdom, we went gradually to having our own sales force do it, and we had another commission sales force that we brought in to sell the paperback for a while after we had reverted the rights, but eventually we become fully uniform.
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, and I almost wonder from the perspective of the sales force, if they worried about their commission, if you're going from, in today's numbers, a $27 book to a $5 book, that's a huge difference that they may have not relished at all, to say, "Why should I kind of demote myself?" Maybe it's the category. Maybe they're just different categories so that they kind of align in different markets.
John Morse: Right. I think that's exactly what it is, and I think it goes to the whole strategy of Merriam-Webster from the beginning is to say that you need to have books at every price point. And it really goes back to the 1860s as there had been a number of different abridgments of Webster's Dictionary, and over the course of the 1850s, '60s, and I guess even into the '70s, '80s, '70s, G&C Merriam reacquires the rights to almost all of the abridgments, so that by the time they're in, I think the '70s, they've got 10 different dictionaries at 10 different price points. Actually, by even the '60s. The sales prices for the 1864 list a whole pyramid of dictionaries at different price points. And so I think exactly that, there's an understanding that you need different size dictionaries for different customers. You can't just force one onto everybody. What happened in the '90s, where you started becoming part of the company, is having established that kind of beachhead of having three strong selling paperbacks, we started building out the line. So it went from three when we reverted the license to, I think, at least a dozen or so by the time I retired. And many of them were the best-selling books in their category. Dictionary was far and away the best-selling dictionary. The paperback thesaurus became the best-selling thesaurus. Scrabble was the best-selling game book. Spanish-English Dictionary was the best-selling Spanish-English dictionary. The Medical Dictionary, I think, was maybe the second best-selling health book. Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, I think was maybe the second best-selling crossword puzzle dictionary. Maybe even took over first after we redesigned it.
Peter Sokolowski: Vocabulary Builder was kind of its own category, but it did very well.
John Morse: Did very well as well. And some of the other bilinguals came on. French certainly did well, and Arabic became about the best-selling Arabic-English dictionary and in paperback format. One of the real success stories. And even in the period of time when we were seeing decreasing print sales, I think most of them are still in print and still doing well, that the price point and the convenience is such that-
Peter Sokolowski: The anecdote that I might get slightly wrong, but basically in 2020 when everyone was suddenly homeschooling, whether they wanted to or not, the Vocabulary Builder had an enormous spike in sales and was among the best-selling books in the spring of 2020 because so many parents bought the book, which among other things has great little quizzes embedded in it. So it is kind of great for self-teaching. It's a great teaching tool. It's a great way to study for a spelling bee. No matter what, it's just a great product. It had a renewed life. It's been around for a while, but a renewal in that moment when people wanted homeschooling textbooks.
John Morse: And I don't think we could have done that kind of line extension if we had not reverted the license, because I think we would've had to have convinced Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster at every step along the way, "This would be a good book to do," whereas as we did it, we were really masters of our own fate, and some of them were not huge successes, but enough were.
Peter Sokolowski: And what this means is that when you kind of arrived, you arrived at the moment this shift was happening and you were part of it then. As a production editor, or what was the element of your role?
John Morse: I started off supervising the intersection between the editorial department and the manufacturing department. So the final manuscript preparation, seeing that it gets off to the typesetter, when it gets back, seeing that it gets proofread. But in time, I started getting involved earlier in the process. So if you really were worried about, "Are you going to get your manuscript out to the typesetter on time?" You really have to start worrying about, "Well, is the copy editor getting it done on time?" And if the copy editor is getting it on time, are they getting bogged up by the cross-reference editor? And if the cross references are getting bogged down, is it because pf the etymologist or is it because of the life science? Where's our backup in all this? Where are the bottlenecks? And again, right back to where I was in 1976 in Chicago, looking at projects and trying to understand why are they working, why aren't they working? Not to the fourth decimal point, but to understand the flow. The person who was one of the masters of doing this and understanding just on an intuitive level how copy is flowing, was Ward Gilman [aka Gil], the person who was director of defining and managing editor of a number of projects at Merriam-Webster. He just had that sense. And a lot of the tools that I used to develop my sense, I really borrowed from Gil. But with that, I was moving further into the authoring part of it. And the dictate, really, from Bill Llewellyn, and really almost anyone who's been running the company, is let's keep the flow of new projects coming. So if you're still trying to get stuff off to the typesetter, but all your definers have finished doing their work, have you got a new project to bring in for the definers to work on, even while we're finishing the tail end of this? And that got me to always having proposals for what would be the next job. So really, a big part of my job was planning the next project and doing the market research and the competitive analysis and project budgeting to figure out if we wanted to have a style manual to compete with other style manuals on the market, who would our big competition be? What seems to be the features set that they all have to have? What could we do that's different? How could we get our staff to create that? How long would it take? How much money would it take? And that's really where I was moving just from production to overall supervision of things.
Peter Sokolowski: And there's so many titles when you think of it. Emily and I, in our time, I think we just assumed there was always an Encyclopedia of Literature or the Collegiate Encyclopedia or the Dictionary of English Usage or the French and the Spanish, and all of these that I just named were essentially projects that you began.
John Morse: Yes.
Peter Sokolowski: And then more and more.
Emily Brewster: The Reader's Handbook.
John Morse: Yes.
Peter Sokolowski: The Reader's Handbook, a great one. There's so many great titles. It's funny because Merriam-Webster books are so basic in so many ways, and the ones that really succeed are the most basic.
John Morse: Right.
Peter Sokolowski: But at the same time, there is an imagination that has to trigger a new category or a new title. And I have to say that I don't think people think about that. I think they assume that there was always an Encyclopedia of Literature or something.
Emily Brewster: It's interesting that you tie it to the need to give the definers something to work on next, because you do not want to lose your definers. A seasoned definer is irreplaceable. You cannot hire a new definer to take over. You have to train that definer until they're up to that skill.
John Morse: Right. So it was because of doing that, initially, the little promotion I got at the end of the Ninth Collegiate was to be editorial production coordinator. But then after that, it was to be manager of editorial operations and planning. And at that point, I was really supposed to be managing all of the editorial operations. I mean, from defining all the way to proofreading, but also the planning to make sure we have new projects to come along. And Peter, at one point you were sort of asking about, what are the hits and the misses? And in a funny way, I'm going to say there were no misses because part of what we were doing was to make sure... Two things we were trying to do. One is the more you have people working on actual projects the way Merriam-Webster did its accounting in those days, the more profitable the company would become. Because if you were working on a project, the salary expense for your time working on the project was capitalized, which is to say you didn't take it as an expense in the year you incurred it. It would get amortized over the life of the book because it was seen as an investment.
Emily Brewster: Yes.
John Morse: So, I mean, if you go out and you invest in new washing machines, that's not an expense. That is an investment, and you only take that expense over the years as they depreciate. And they would do the same thing with books, that the book would get depreciated over the life of the copyright. So the more I kept people working on income-producing projects, the more profitable the company became. From that point of view, there were no misses because I was keeping people involved in income-producing projects. But also from the salespeople's point of view, they had a hard time getting in to make a sales call on a Barnes & Noble or a Borders or a Crown or whatever, if they didn't have something new to show the person. If they were going to say, "Well, I want to come in and see if we can sell you some more dictionaries," the person would say, "I know all about your dictionaries. I don't have to see you. If I need new dictionaries, I'll buy them." So they didn't really get a chance to make a little sales spiel. If they had a new title or a new edition of an old title, now they could get a sales call. So some of what we were doing, and I think, Peter, you were asking about the books in the Lighter Side of Language series, where we deliberately diverged from hard reference and went into just telling stories about language, whether those books succeeded or not, they got the salesman the appointment, and we probably were able to sell more dictionaries because they could go in and get the appointment because we had Flappers to Rappers or one of the other Lighter Side books.
Peter Sokolowski: What's In A Name or-
John Morse: Any of those.
Peter Sokolowski: Word Circus. Shakespeare. Coined by Shakespeare. There's a bunch of them. And that makes me think of another category, which we haven't mentioned, which is children's dictionaries or school dictionaries. Was there a full line of children's dictionaries in 1980?
John Morse: No. We numbered the school dictionaries, as you recall, SD1, SD2, SD3, and SD4-
Peter Sokolowski: School dictionary, yeah.
John Morse: School Dictionary One, School Dictionary Two. When I came in, there were three of the four. There was the school dictionary for high school students, SD3 for middle school students, the intermediate, SD2 for upper elementary that we called Elementary Dictionary. There was no beginner's dictionary, which we had just always called the shorthand SD1. There never had been an SD1. We were somewhat hemmed in by a fact that we got into most schools through a school licensee. We weren't selling direct to schools ourselves. Originally, it was American Book Company, and if you walk around the floor, you see a lot of old kids' dictionaries that say American Book Company. They were our licensee to sell direct to schools, and we did not sell direct to schools. We only sold essentially those same dictionaries into the retail market. So American Book Company would sell to schools, we would sell retail. By the time I was there, American Book Company was not interested in the middle school dictionary. In terms of the school licensee, that was only SD4 and SD2. We still sold SD3 to the trade. About the time I got there, for one reason or another, we stopped licensing through American Book Company and started licensing through Ginn and Company. Ginn and Company did get interested in SD3. So for most of my time at Merriam, those were the three that we were selling. Eventually, not unlike the situation with paperbacks, we felt we couldn't get to a good enough agreement with a school licensee, so we said, "We're going to revert the whole license." We were in no position to sell to schools. At one point, we had had an educational sales force, but I think it was mostly aimed at colleges, and before I even got there, they disbanded the educational sales force and collapsed it into a combined with the trade force, which is why there's a piece of Merriam-Webster vocabulary when we talk about, "What does Jed do?" Jed's in charge of trade and education sales, and the reason that education is there is the department he runs historically comes from combining the trade force with the education force. So at that point, we were really kind of on our own to sell, and that's where we really developed the understanding of all of the other distributors who sell direct to schools. So no, we couldn't sell direct to schools, but we did start selling direct to school and library distributors, and that became a very successful part of the publishing program. I think to this day, we're still selling plenty of print dictionaries into schools because of our relationships with the school and library distributors. They range from very small to very large. They are uniformly wonderful people. I used to go to their convention every year. They had a group that actually was called, interestingly, the Educational Paperback Association, because historically their beginning was getting language arts teachers to use paperback editions of fiction books in their classroom. So they had that whole paperback background to them as well, and we've done very well with all of that. One of the requests that was always coming back to our sales force from those school and library distributors, and also from the trade accounts is, "Why don't you have a beginner's dictionary? Why isn't there an SD1?" And I was hounded unmercifully for years and years, "Merriam-Webster has to create an SD1." And I tried proposal after proposal to try to figure out how we could do it, and I couldn't figure it out. Creating a dictionary for first and second-graders actually turns out to be a very tricky proposition because they really recognize more words than they can easily use, so your definitions are going to be harder than the word you're defining. If they're wondering about a word, you're likely to be explaining it to them in words that are tougher than the word they're looking up. It was hard to figure out how you could do anything useful. You could do sort of a glorified ABC book, but that wasn't what they were really looking for. I looked at the marketplace and what I pretty much decided is these are books that are basically designed to make parents and teachers think they're helping, whether they are or they aren't. I didn't want to do a bad book just to satisfy the sales representatives. My savior in this was Vicky Neufeld, who was another case where a dictionary company was downsizing. In this case it was Simon & Schuster with Webster's New World, and Vicky was about ready to jump ship from Webster's New World, and we said, "Yes, please, Vicky." And in some of the talks I had with her, I understood if anyone on the face of this earth can figure out how to do an SD1, Vicky Neufeld can do it, and in fact, she did, and we did come out with SD1. I think it's a lovely book.
Emily Brewster: The illustrations are beautiful. The layout is beautiful. It's a very attractive book.
Peter Sokolowski: It's kind of a storybook about words, not of strict reference because that young reader, the first-grader is not going to know to look up lexicographer under L, whatever. But there is a lot of information about the sounds of letters and the clusters, and of course, the illustrations were made by a very famous illustrator.
John Morse: Ruth Heller was the illustrator who does wonderful work. Vicky had had identified two or three potential illustrators, but I took one look at Ruth's work, "This is it." Also, she had done a little series of books about the parts of speech of the English language, so she had a little book about adverbs and a little book about prepositions, a little book about nouns. What we were able to do for Ruth, speaking of ABC books, is take the Alpha Openers where she did a whole thing about each of the letters of the alphabet, we published that as a separate volume while we were trying to get the-
Emily Brewster: Kind of ended up with an SD1 and an SD0.
John Morse: SD0.
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, it was, is, an alphabet book, and each letter has a poem that includes all of the sounds that are made by that letter in conjunction with other letters or by itself. And those are really, really fun to read, and it's a terrific little book.
Emily Brewster: Well, the other thing that a book like SD1 does, and that SD1 does I think very, very well, is that it introduces a child to the concept of a dictionary and gives them pleasure in knowing that this book is for them, and it's a great book to read with children, and it's a lovely book.
Peter Sokolowski: It's got the letters on the side so that they... It's like the thumb tabs and-
John Morse: And I think they have now renamed it to Webster's Beginner's Dictionary, Beginning Dictionary.
Emily Brewster: Oh, I think that might be right.
Peter Sokolowski: Or Beginner's. Yeah, yeah.
John Morse: Webster's First.
Peter Sokolowski: Websters First Dictionary, okay.
John Morse: It came out as Webster's Primary Dictionary, and then it's now Webster's First Dictionary.
Emily Brewster: Webster's First, yeah.
John Morse: And I think that's what that genre is usually called, is First Dictionary. What we call Elementary is usually called Beginner's Dictionary, and I think what we call Intermediate is usually called Student Dictionary in other publishers, and I think what we call School is probably called School.
Peter Sokolowski: And these lead up to, of course, the Collegiates. I seem to recall an anecdote from a member of our sales staff that Intermediate Dictionary, the SD3, was the big seller because it was used for very smart elementary kids and for those having trouble reading who were in high school. In other words, it was the book that kind of cut in both directions and was very flexible in that way.
John Morse: Right. I think we were smart to have called it Intermediate, even though people groaned as to "What the hell kind of name is intermediate when most of the dictionaries for that age group are called student?" But I think by being a little more flexible about what is the age group, I think that helped. It was often the best-selling of the three.
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah. Someone explained that to me and I just thought, "Oh, it makes perfect sense." I just had never thought of that.
Emily Brewster: And it was the dictionary that then became Wordcentral.com, which was a student dictionary website.
John Morse: Right.
Peter Sokolowski: A footnote that I want to interject just because listeners are deep in the weeds at this point, but there is an interesting phenomenon about school distribution for dictionaries because Merriam-Webster is a small trade publisher, whereas some of our competitors were small parts of textbook companies, and so that specifically American Heritage was part of Houghton Mifflin for a long time, and Webster's New World was part of Wiley. They had distribution that went right into the schools, right into the libraries and the classrooms to the teachers. You're buying a set of social studies textbooks. Here's your dictionary, too. They had a highway into the schools that Merriam-Webster never had. It's just a detail, but you realize there's a kind of infrastructure of publishing that we couldn't change, and it's just the way it is.
Emily Brewster: And yet we, the underdog, persisted. Our conversation with John Morse continues in our next episode. For the Word of the Day and all your general dictionary needs, visit Merriam-Webster.com. Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt.
