Collins - Previous Editions

FREDERICK HOWARD COLLINS was born in 1857. Very little is known about his life, not even his place or date of birth, and anyone with more information than the meagre amount offered here is invited to contact me.

Before creating his Author and Printer, Collins was principally know for writing An Epitome of the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, which ran to at least four editions between 1890 and 1897. Collins appears to have been a personal friend of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a pre-Darwinian evolutionary philosopher often thought to be one of the first sociologists. (Spencer’s work is largely discredited now, and never enjoying a significant following among his peers; yet his ambitious attempt to systematize all knowledge within the framework of modern science—and especially in terms of evolution—enjoyed widespread and enthusiastic popularity during his own life.)

Collins did not compile the original material for his dictionary systematically, in the manner of traditional dictionaries. Instead he accumulated over many years an extended card index, which he arranged and rearranged. While he relied on the scholarly recommendations of the Oxford English Dictionary (in so far as it was completed in 1905), he originated new rules where no previous guidance existed, particularly concerning capitalization, italicization, and punctuation—realms largely beyond the interest of lexicography: he is credited with the ‘invention’ of the serial comma (the second in e.g. ‘red, white, and blue’), such that in Britain the device is still often called the ‘Oxford comma’

In addition to offering ‘Authorities Consulted’, the Preface to the first edition of Author and Printer provides the ‘Readers of the Proofs of This Work’, listing an impressive number of luminaries in the publishing and writing world. (It is likely that Collins was a member of the Society of Authors on the strength of his Epitome.)

The impact of Collins’s book was felt beyond Oxford and OUP. Within a short space of time it had influenced the house styles of many other publishers both in Britain and abroad, as well as learned societies and newspapers such as The Times. The decisions propounded in it have become incorporated into standard practice around the world.

Collins seems to have lived at least the last decade of his life in Torquay; he died there of a cerebral hemmorrhage, age 53, on 16 November 1910.

This page contains a list of all the editions of Collins’s book and its replacements; choose an edition and click on its link to see its description and the text of its preliminary matter. If you want to look at each edition in turn in a single linear progression (e.g. starting with the first edition and working through the second, third, etc. to the last), follow the links at the foot of each edition’s page, which associate that edition with the one that preceded and followed it.

The original editions’ preliminary matter sometimes reprinted prefaces and notes from earlier editions. Here, however, for the sake of clarity and concision, prefaces and notes are not repeated in subsequent editions, but rather highlighted with a link to the edition in which they first appeared; once you have followed the link, click on your browser’ ‘Back’ button to return to your starting place, or use the linear links at the bottom of each page.

I have not normalized the punctuation in the original texts; any marginal comments are made in square brackets. To differentiate previously published text further from other copy, it is displayed fully justified—in other words, aligned on both left and right margins. While the original uniformly has paragraphs set close-up with indents, in the interests of clarity I have adopted the usual Web convention of separating paragraphs with a line space. Images from previous editions have been reduced in size for ease of downloading. Those with either broadband access or supreme patience can contact me for higher-resolution (300 dpi) versions.