[词典科普] [Madeline Kripke][The Dame of Dictionaries]

However, another gem of the piece is its description of Madeline Kripke (the sister of the noted philosopher and logician Saul Kripke), who must surely be the world's most avid collector of and dealer in dictionaries and books about them, with a particular emphasis on dictionaries of slang. She owns, at the last estimate, some 20,000 works, piled up in her apartment in New York's Greenwich Village as well as in three other warehouses around the city. Her landlord unsuccessfully tried to evict her in 1996 for using her dwelling as a business, and they eventually settled on the condition that she register a different business address and cease storing books in the hallway—a pretty light sentence, all things considered. The book collectors' site Americana Exchange ran a lengthy interview with Ms Kripke a few years ago, in which she talks about the favourites in her collection.

A woman turns her passion for words into one of the world’s preeminent dictionary collections, filling her West Village home to the bursting point with some 20,000 titles.