This was my grandfather's. He was born in 1912, but this dictionary is from the 60s. I was told he used it a fair amount. I could easily imagine a book of various bits and pieces of information like this would be pretty neat in a pre-internet world. But that part that would drive me nuts is so much of it is so limited, because it's just meant as reference. You want to know more than one sentence worth of anything, you need to put shoes on and drive a car.

It's beautifully bound in this wavy patterned hard shell, and the same pattern is in the cardstock first and last pages. The actual cover is a treated leather of some kind, very soft. It smells so much like a book that after 30 minutes or more of browsing it, the smell had become a taste that lingers on my tongue. That hard shell case it's in must have sealed in several decades of book mustiness.

The contents have the usual abundance of stuff no one needs to know, then or now, like a full blown pronunciation guide that made me want to barf just looking at it; lists of colleges and if they were coed or not; the proper way to formally address people of various titles (apparently rabbis can be called Dr.?); and a list of "arbitrary symbols" (indeed!). Did you know that Zelda is short for Griselda? Well it is. Did you want a little picture of an accordion next to the definition of accordion? You got it. Did people not universally know what an accordion looks like? Did Weird Al single-handedly solve that problem in the 80s? Probably.