Rauner Special Collections Library

October 16th was "Dictionary Day," so named because it is Noah Webster's birthday. Sure, we have lots of editions of Webster's dictionary, from his initial 1806 attempt to catalog American English to the final beast of a book published in 1828. But, while those are cool and all, they are not exactly hep to the times, so today we feature our suite of Cab Calloway lexicological lessons including the 1944 Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: the Language of Jive. Like Webster, Calloway was looking to define a specific form of English.

We've got an evil one this week, both in terms of a book's subject matter and its impact in the world. Back in the fifteenth century, European Christians were developing a new understanding of how Satan worked on Earth: that he could bestow demonic powers onto humans so that they could commit harm through magic and undermine faith in God. This, among other factors, prompted the prosecution of those accused of practicing this diabolic witchcraft and the onset of the European witch hunts.

When people think of the invention of moveable type and the start of commercial printing in the West, their minds usually go to monumental works like the Gutenberg Bible or the Nuremberg Chronicle, but the bread and butter for printers was in the production of more ephemeral documents. Single sheet broadsides far outnumbered weighty tomes, they just aren't the things that survived. One of the more common printing jobs was almanacs--handy guides that you could pin up on wall and then toss out at the end of the year.