I remember the first time I saw the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
It came in a slipcase with a little drawer for its magnifying lens. We sold it at the academic bookstore in Toronto where I worked, and we kept a copy in the window. Whenever someone came in and plunked down over a hundred dollars for it, I always struck up a conversation about what a marvellous thing it was.
I'd seen the OED before then, of course. We had the 11-volume set in the English classroom in my high-school. I loved pulling down a copy and getting lost in it, browsing it for hours at stretch sometimes. I knew that there would come a day when I'd own this for myself.
Then came my adulthood, when I found myself moving, first cross-continent, then overseas and back – twice! – and I never felt rooted enough to invest in quite that much physical product. I toyed with buying various CD ROM editions, but never got to it, at first because it wouldn't run on the OS I was using, then because I'd switched to subnotebooks without CD drives.
