Pictionary

Why people are paying $2,600 for a dictionary with no definitions.

(Globe Staff Photo / Suzanne Kreiter)

IT HAS THE name Webster's on the cover, and the impressive binding of a traditional dictionary, but there aren't any definitions inside - only pages and pages of illustrations, detailed black-and-white engravings of birds, plants, architectural elements, parts of the body, geometric figures, heraldic devices.

The book costs $2,600, and that's the least-expensive edition. It took the artist nearly a dozen years to create. And - perhaps most strangely for a dictionary whose entries are images - it has become an overwhelming object of desire for lexicographers.

The Pictorial Webster's may be the most curious of the many volumes that have borne the name Webster's over the years. It's the creation of Johnny Carrera, an artist, letterpress printer, and bookbinder who lives in Waltham. Inspired by the beauty of the illustrations in early dictionaries, he painstakingly reprinted more than 400 pages of engravings from the 1859 edition of Merriam-Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, the first illustrated dictionary published in America.

Carrera found the original engravings - more than 12,000 - at the Sterling Library at Yale, and then spent 12-hour days organizing and cleaning them. He set and printed them by hand, 16 pages at a time, on a letterpress. The book's pages are hand-sewn; the indented thumb tabs on the page edges are cut by hand as well. The label on the spine is printed with gold leaf. Carrera's process, laborious and painstaking, gives you the feeling it could have been just as well accomplished by candlelight.

The Pictorial Webster's powerfully evokes a kind of reference work that, if not already gone, is fast disappearing. Carrera's work feels more like a dictionary than any modern Webster's - it embodies all the tropes of dictionaryhood, without actually being one. It speaks to the longing we have for familiar shapes, even when we know that pure functionality is better served through different means: It is a dictionary for those of us who might want, at the same instant, an iPhone for our pocket and a retro-styled black faux-rotary dial telephone for the bedside table. The Pictorial Webster's represents a dictionary in the same way that the TV series "Mad Men" represents the New York of the 1960s. It feels more true than the truth.

To lexicographers, the appeal is immediate and visceral. "I want it," said Grant Barrett, editor of the online-only Double-Tongued Dictionary. Steve Kleinedler, an editor at the American Heritage Dictionary, bought his soon after seeing a presentation by Carrera at a Dictionary Society of North America meeting last June in Chicago. "It's a lot of art, bound into one volume, which itself is art, creating one total piece of art," he said. Charles Hodgson, of Podictionary, a daily dictionary podcast, likes the book because it "stretches and bends the meaning of the word 'dictionary.' "

Carrera calls his book a "visual Finnegans Wake of 19th-century America." By arranging the illustrations in alphabetical order, without their distracting definitions, he said he wanted to force readers to make involuntary connections between the images, to create a kind of sense out of nonsense.

Michael Hancher, a professor of English at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the history of dictionary illustrations, says that the 1859 dictionary that was the source of the engravings would have had a similar effect on its readers - "a sense of pleasure at staring into the book" - and it was a pleasure that the Merriam salespeople were happy to emphasize (although they called it learning).

What would Noah Webster himself think of this book? Probably not much: In his 1843 book, "Modes of Teaching the English Language," Webster quoted criticisms of images in children's schoolbooks: They made the children handle the books too much, so that they tore the books and dirtied them. "Gentlemen observe," he wrote, that images "have very much promoted superficial learning."

Erin McKean is a lexicographer (dictionaryevangelist.com) and blogger (dressaday.com).