Education: Monument to Shakespeare

One day in 1926 a husky corn-fed Texan named Anderson Baten retired to his Dallas cottage, opened the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and began reading about “AABENRAA, a town of Denmark.” Two years later, without having skipped a word between, he came to “ZYGOTE, the biological term for the fertilized egg,” closed the last volume, went prayerfully to bed. Next morning he arose at 6 a. m., took a five-mile walk with his wife. After breakfast he sat down at his desk in the centre of a horseshoe of book-stacked tables. When Anderson Baten left his study sometime between 2 and 3 o’clock the next morning A Complete Dictionary of Shakespeare had been definitely started.

Into this compilation during the next six years Lexicographer Baten packed a definition and discussion of every one of the 15,000 words Shakespeare ever used. The word “love” which the Elizabethan found 2,559 occasions to mention took days and days of special work. Each locality mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems was carefully described. A biography of each historical character was written and a sketch of the origins of each fictitious one. The Dukes of Bedford and Beaufort made particular trouble because Shakespeare referred to several without bothering to distinguish between them. Summarized were all the scholarly comments on every disputed passage, and the Baconian theory was exhaustively surveyed.

By last week Anderson Baten had finished writing into his 1,500,000 word Complete Dictionary every last scrap of information about Shakespeare he could lay his hands on. Then he journeyed North to deliver the final section of his bulky manuscript to his publishers, John C. Winston Co. of Philadelphia (Winston Simplified Dictionary). Until he sent them the first part five months ago, they did not know he was writing the Shakespeare dictionary. But last week Lexicographer William Dodge Lewis, editor of the Winston company, was sure that it was “one of the monumental works of all time.”

Determination and scholarship are bred in the Baten stock. Anderson’s greatgrandfather was hard-driving Colonel Ephraim Williams who founded Williams College. His father was president of struggling little Howard Payne College at Brownwood. Tex. But Anderson Baten describes himself as simply “a corn-fed country boy from Texas who doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.” His youthful ambition was to be a champion weightlifter. When he was 23 he performed the terrific feat of raising a 250-lb. dumbbell above his head. Satisfied with that, he turned to literature. Before he started reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover for background he had plowed his way through 10,000 other volumes, compiled an anthology called The Philosophy of Life.

Stocky and squarejawed, Anderson Baten paced back & forth in his Manhattan hotel room last week with the energy of a man who cannot relax. “Never,” he declaimed, “was so much work done by a single individual! It was the word ‘complete’ which kept me going. Sometimes I walked the floor for an hour asking myself, ‘Baten, why are you doing this?’ But I said to myself, ‘Baten, you are an average man with the ability to work and a physical constitution capable of taking gigantic punishment. Baten, you were put in the world to do this work.'”

Baten attributes his stamina to his weight-lifting physique and to the vegetables fed him by his dietician wife. Only his eyes, behind thick spectacles, threatened to fail him.

“Oh, I tell you,” he recalled, “my faith was tested when I reached the ‘S’s.’ Eye specialists told me I would have to stop if I wanted to retain my sight. But I came to New York to see a doctor and went up the Empire State Building and as I stood there looking out over the great city something said to me, ‘Baten, you’re big, too. Go home and finish that dictionary.’ “

Five months of proofreading lie between Anderson Baten and the final appearance of his tremendous volume. But already his thoughts are running ahead to a philosophical novel, about the length of Anthony Adverse.