The new, three-and-a-half shelf-metre, 62.5 million-word Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) brings to mind what Dante Gabriel Rossetti (q.v.) once wrote about Top, his pet wombat (d. 1870): it is ‘a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness’.
In sixty volumes, the ODNB covers 54,922 lives in 50,113 biographical articles ranging in length from brief notes of a few dozen words to 37,400 ... (read more)