Roget's Thesaurus...

...several editions. Here are a few.

I love these old books. Was deciding today to clear out the dictionaries, but I do have them going back to the late 1800's. so the new ones, that is 1950's to current day are in the charity shop bag. I kept all the old ones. I love them. The smell of the print. The feel of the raised surface of the print. The yellowed paper. I love them all. And also for the differing explanations of words over the ages.

Then was looking through my thesauruses. Can't throw any of those away. Not the old ones. A couple of modern ones I don't like and I can look on the Internet anyway for current stuff. So they have hit the charity bag.

These I have photographed here are all Roget's.

The top photo is the frontispiece to the 1912 edition.

The photo on the left is from the 1857 edition of Roget's Thesaurus by Longmans.

The photo on the right is the 1912 edition of Roget's Thesaurus by EVERYMAN LIBRARY by Dent who made reasonably priced books to reach the ordinary man. This where the top photo of the frontispiece is from.

On the bottom left is the 1936 edition of Roget's Thesaurus by Longmans.

On the bottom right is a 1987 edition of Roget's Thesaurus which I absolutely hate. This is also by Longmans. All these photos were taken in my pottingshed. Same light. Same time. But you can see the paper reflects a strange blue tint. I find it hard to read. Also the layout has changed drastically from the early versions. There are literally lists of words in this modern version and it makes my eyes swim and not focus. Whereas the early versions are laid out differently in a manner that my eyes can assimilate the information on the page much more easily.

Each one of these editions has differences reflecting the age it was written and edited and I love comparing each book for these differences for the same word.