Berkshire Review’s Holiday Gift List: Books and Classical Recordings, by Michael Miller
I should most likely not distract you from giving a subscription to The Berkshire Review as a holiday gift. We need subscriptions to carry on our work, but there are a few items that have come in for review that I can warmly suggest as excellent gifts. These are not systematic, and they are not always serious, but we do recommend them. Some of them will be reviewed in detail over the following weeks.
Books
David Crystal, Evolving English - One Language, Many Voices - An Illustrated History of the English Language, The British Library, 2010. (Distributed in the U. S. by the University of Chicago Press)
This on the whole spectacularly realized picture book was produced as a catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the British Library that closed earlier this year.
The English language and its history have attracted more enthusiasts than any other, it seems, not only because so many people use it, either as a mother tongue or a second language, and its spelling and grammar unleash so many irrational demons at the poor people who try to learn it, but the particular distribution of the linguistic streams which flowed together to create it have left easily identifiable signs of their separate identities: the Germanic, the Celtic, the Latin, Danish, French, Dutch, Indian, etc. English is by no means unique in this respect, but it wears the most colorful plumage. English speakers have also created a particularly fascinating body of physical artifacts and images relating to the language. The British Library is particularly rich in these holdings, and this exhibition was pretty much the last word—or display—on the subject, although some important and impressive objects, like the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum (the sumptuous handle of a pointer King Alfred gave his bishops to encourage them to learn to read), were necessarily not included, since there were no loans. In the book you will find every object superbly illustrated, although some illustrations are too small to read. On the other hand, everything is transcribed, both as written and in modern English. You will find Runic inscriptions, the Franks casket, the MS of Beowulf, Bibles of Wycliffe, Tyndale, King James, et. al., the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, the usual Shakespearean materials, various grammars, dictionaries, and language aids (including the now quaint BBC pronunciation guide for radio announcers of 1928), medieval and Renaissance letters and diaries, cookery books, guides to slang, hornbooks, broadsides, advertisements, children's books, instructive and entertaining, novels, and of course Alice in Wonderland.

