Dictionary Find of the Year!

This last weekend, my mom and I were wandering through a local antique mall and we kept finding items that we wanted and would have bought if we had an unlimited budget.  I am an avid reader and one of my dreams is to one day have a personal library.  So, that means collecting books.  I absolutely love antique books and I have been collecting them for a few years now.  I try to get books that were printed in the 1920's or before.  So far, I have over twenty books that are 1920's or older.  Since the beginning, I have been on the look out for a big dictionary and a set of encyclopedias.  These, however, are very hard to find and even harder to find at a good price. 

Well, I finally found one... well, actually two!  :-)  While in one of the vender booths, my mom (who has also wanted a big dictionary for years) found one and it was only $16.  Wow!  We wondered, since the vendor liked it enough to buy it, then, maybe they bought more.  And, as luck would have it, they did!  The second one we found was $26, a little more than the other, but that was probably because the cover was different.  When we bought them, we asked if we could get both for the same price because they were both the same year...1966.  The vendor said that we could have them for $30 since we were buying both.  Wow!  You can't beat that price!  :-) 

Those two dictionaries were two of three things that we bought that day in the antique mall.  The other, I will talk about in a later blog post, so keep checking back.  :-) 

This is the one my mom found first.

This is the second one we found.

They are each five inches thick!

That is a lot of paper!

Just inside the front cover is a tree with all the different languages of the world.  It also has a dictionary of foreign words and phrases, a dictionary of scripture proper names and foreign words, abbreviations commonly used in writing and printing, practical business mathematics, forms of address, tables of weights and measures, special signs and symbols, presidents of the United States, Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, history of Canada, air distances between principal cities, and in the back there are maps of the world, continents, and the United States.

I love some of the illustrations next the the definitions... especially this one, obviously.  ;-)  For those of you who don't know, I am a harpist.  :-)  This was such a great find!