Erzsebet Gilbert
12/29/2011 6:30 pm
Logodaedaly, or, Sleight-of-Words
Wolverine Farm Publishing (Fort Collins CO)
"In 1951, novelist, logophile and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov shed his cloak of European elan and pulled on hiking boots to tramp Colorado's mountains in search of rare butterflies. Sixty years later, he has returned! But this time it's in the spirit and intellect of young but worldly and word-drunk Erzsébet Gilbert, a fellow gourmand of the wonderful, whose shimmering tales would have delighted him. Actually, this book will delight anyone." ~ John Calderazzo, author of Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives
What is a balanoid? Who carries an ombrifuge into a storm? How is a filipendulous city destroyed? These and other fabulous questions are found in Logodædaly, or, Sleight-of-Words: a dictionary of the imagination. Within its pages, young author Erzsébet Gilbert has delved into the history of the English language to unearth a host of forgotten, quirky, obsolete and utterly bizarre words, and created a phrasebook like no other. It is a dictionary whose entries are not merely words, but the fantastical stories and wild musings behind them—a dictionary of two-headed serpents and royal assassins, warrior birds and people on the moon, specters and true love.
As vividly antiquated as it is experimental, the ornately designed book features the original images—from dragons to hummingbirds—of artist Sherise Talbott, illuminations whose intricacy and style might have emerged from the museums of centuries ago. Through Logodædaly one might not learn an everyday vocabulary, but beyond A and Z the reader finds that the meaning of a word is always much more than it seems.
“Gilbert's Logodædaly is a feat of writerly derring-do, a Borgesian excursion, one both gleeful and droll. She is a skilled fabulist, an astute lover of the more recondite quarters of the English language, and the reader's charming and witty companion-guide across this erudite terrain.” ~ Barry Lopez
