Container-less Content? Not in This Digital Age.
Marshaling sufficient resources for such an organizational and scholarly endeavor wasn't easy. The Delegates of Oxford University Press, as its governing board is known, had originally budgeted £9,000 for completion. Relatively early it became evident the OED was intensely cash hungry and in the end it would consume some £300,000 of the press's money. One way of relieving the burden was to release small, lightly bound sections of the dictionary -- fascicles -- which could later be bound into a complete edition. The frame here is very different from the finished object; cheaper, smaller, bittier. However, through the fascicles the difficult process of typesetting and layout design was accomplished, all of which provides a sub-frame for the content or what you see on a page (incidentally setting the standard for dictionaries to come).
- People:
- Michael Bhaskar