The Surgeon of Crowthorne

This narrative history follows two men behind the Oxford English Dictionary in the late nineteenth century. James Murray, the editor in his Scriptorium, receives thousands of quotation slips from Dr W. C. Minor, an American surgeon confined at Broadmoor after a killing in Lambeth. The book reconstructs Minor's Civil War service, his delusions, the murder, and the long correspondence that made a patient one of the Dictionary's most valued readers, together with Murray's visit to Crowthorne. It is a history of a book and a crime, not a medical textbook.

Bound in dark blue buckram, cover blocked in cream with a design by Tim Laing. Dark blue slipcase.