In the summer of 1999 I was working at a publishing company, spending days flipping through their image archive to come up with ideas for a children’s picture dictionary. At one point, I submitted a picture of myself, swiftly dismissed on the grounds of “bad skin.”
Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities doesn’t suffer that fate. Rather than work with a spotty faced youth, the book employs historic engravings from Webster’s Dictionaries of the 19th-century. The result is a fine reference point for artists, designers, and the generally curious.
Available now from Amazon.
A few pages from Pictorial Webster’s after the jump.