The heavens cracked open spilling blinding white sunbeams around my feet. Accompanied by a chorus of unearthly song a copy of Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities descended from on high, floating on a pillow of cumulus clouds.

This is what happened* when I saw this book at the Chronicle Books Renegade Fair booth on Saturday.

*(This bit of movie drama is brought to you by my overactive imagination and happened entirely in my head. Had this heavenly vision actually occurred I would have made a very unholy mess right where I was standing. Thankfully, this did not happen.)

Pictorial Webster’s features over 1,500 engravings that originally graced the pages of Webster’s dictionaries in the 19th century. Printer, bookbinder, and artist John M. Carrera meticulously cleaned and restored the images and compiled this volume of “alphabetically arranged archetypes and curiosities” that “create enigmatic juxtapositions and illustrate the items deemed important to the Victorian mind.” Bookish kids and adults are bound to find hours of inspiration within its pages.

In the summer of 1995, while poking around his grandmother’s stone farmhouse, John M. Carrera discovered a tattered 1898 Webster’s International Dictionary under his grandfather’s favorite reading chair. The loose pages revealed an eighty-page section devoted entirely to the illustrations of the dictionary: a stunning array of odd and wonderful elements printed by category. The fantastic variety of subjects was matched only by the detail and variety of engraving techniques.

“That fall I contacted the Merriam-Webster Company and discovered that the engravings still existed,” says Carrera. “I found out that they had been given to Yale University. This book is the culmination of a long odyssey to put the engravings back into print and make a book designed to educate, inspire, and entertain. It’s a record of all the wonderful natural discoveries and innovations of the time of the Industrial Revolution.”

In addition, Carrera published a fine press edition of the book featuring engraved covers and letterpressed interiors (see above) created in a edition of 26, lettered A-Z. Chronicle Books is giving away a copy (fingers crossed!) to celebrate the book’s release - enter to win here.

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