“We can only talk about the things we name”: Talking About The Dictionary Story with Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston

Once in a while I may encounter a picture book that confuses me in a good way. It might be its messaging, or the way in which was written. Perhaps it’s the overall theme or it is simply doing something original that I’ve not seen in a picture book before. Whatever the case, these books are meant to be treasured. They are odd and strange and original, and they only appear once in a blue moon.

This year, The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston is that book.

Picture, if you will, a book with a lovely story and fun illustrations that is also packed to the gills with small jokes. Hundreds and hundreds of them. In The Dictionary Story, faux definitions of surprising humor dot the pages. Here are some examples of what I mean:

yoga /ˈjəʊ.ɡə/ A system of physical exercise and meditation that is thousands of years old and comes from ancient India. It inspires some to live in the mountains and never speak again, and others to go shopping for brightly colored Lycra and rubber mats.

heart /hɑːt/The organ that pumps blood around an animal’s body. It’s also the part of the body that helps people recover from trying to think too much. (See headache.) Hearts help heads make good decisions. When things are going well, the heart feels full; not so well, it aches.

Frankly, I was curious. What precisely goes into making a book of this sort. As luck would have it, I got a chance to find out.

Just a quick note that Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston are answering as a single, solitary soul in the course of this interview. My temptation, therefore, was to refer to them as Olivsa Jefferston.

Which I resisted.

Barely.

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Betsy Bird: It’s an absolute delight to talk to the two of you about this absolute delight of a book. I think a lot of people after reading THE DICTIONARY STORY would be in the same position as me, full of questions. Before I jump into the bulk of them, though, I’m going to have to ask the obvious one right from the start: The origin story. Where did this book and this collaboration, not just between you two but between you and what feels like an actual team of people, come from?

Sam & Oliver: It’s a real pleasure to talk with you about the book. A related but very different version was first written by Sam when he was at art school 23 years ago. At that time, he had this to say: “When we read, words take on an existence unto themselves – what would happen if words could do this without our help. The result is what I call A Dictionary Story, a tale where the text decided to take on its own personality and character even before it was read.”

It was more of a typographic poem (but still called A Dictionary Story).

Over the years it’s come into contact with a host of people – like Penny Silva the then director of the Oxford English Dictionary who in 2004 showed Sam the room ‘where all the words that aren’t in the dictionary’ are kept.

Betsy: In this book every single definition is not only original but funny and sometimes has pertinent ties to the plot. Impressive in and of itself. Then you get to the fact that there are 443 of them. Aside from the fact that you have now possibly written the official world record holder of Most Words in a Picture Book (20,000 words, as I understand it) I would love to know a little more about the logistics that went into this. How on earth do you collaborate on 443 definitions?

Sam & Oliver: The truthful answer is – slowly! Shona Frazer prepared a vast amount of material by supplying some basic definition copy that worked as a skeleton for us to then adapt into jokes, philosophical reflections and little plot teasers. Because Sam was working with the typography – which often demanded a definition being a few lines longer or shorter to fit the visual of the page – he then created the bulk of them. These were then sent to Oliver as he added further jokes, observations and feedback.

Once we were in a place where all the copy was sent to two editors at Walker books, Lizzie Sitton and Alice Dawes, they sent that back to us edited and we went about placing that inside to book. Yes, I suspect that is likely a world record for the amount of words for a picture book.

This also doesn’t begin to touch upon how much work then needs to be done for the French or Italian translations of the book !

Betsy: Gah! I don’t even want to think about that! Now, as I understand it, the book took around six years to finish in total. During that time was it ever backburnered or was it continually something you worked on on a regular basis?

Sam & Oliver: I think it would be fair to say someone, somewhere was working on it over most of that period. There were certainly more intensive periods where we both got together to work intensively and make some bigger editorial decisions and then there were slower spots where either Oliver would work on the photography, or Haein was making the book or Sam was cooking up definitions.

Betsy: One thing I only learned later, and particularly liked, was that many of the words being defined were famously excised from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. At what point in the creative process did you decide to include these words once again? And did you have any particular favorites?

Sam & Oliver: Sam had been talking with the author Robert Macfarlane about a project around endangered languages and was aware of his brilliant book The Lost Words with the illustrator Jackie Morris. That project beautifully highlighted some of these words disappearing from children’s dictionaries – which first gained media attention in the UK back in 2007 when words like almond, blackberry and crocus were omitted, and words like analogue and celebrity came in.

Sam’s project, the picture book One & Everything, also beautifully explored language loss and how young imaginations are so vital in keeping our words and languages alive.

It felt like a natural thing to include some ‘lost words’. We’re really happy that you picked up on this, because that was exactly our intention; to talk about why the Dictionary is so important, to make missing words a talking point. The more we name them – the likelier they will make it back into the dictionary.

That’s what’s interesting about books. If a book brings a word back into circulation then it begins to get closer to being included in a dictionary.

We can only talk about the things we name

Betsy: The art appears have been a team effort. Your publication page cites Haein Song as the person responsible for the physical Dictionary in this book with additional credit to photographer Yasmina Cowan. That’s not even including the credit you give to “the skill of the creatives” including Emma Miller, Libby Higgins, Kirk Moffatt, Fru Czech, Johnny Miller, and Rory Jeffers.” Could you give us a little more understanding of each of your roles in the illustration process and also what these folks did for the book itself? For example, I wasn’t able to tell if the physical dictionary in the book actually got beaten up or if Haein created several dictionaries in various states of disrepair.

Sam & Oliver: Haein Song is an amazing artist book maker as well as a bookbinder. We commissioned her to make us a prop dictionary to photograph (which was mainly Oliver and Yasmina’s role to capture in images). In the end she made us two, which worked perfectly as that meant we had a pristine copy, which is what you see at the start of the story, and then we also had a spare that we severely distressed, and that’s the book you see at the end.

Libby Higgins works in Sam’s studio and Emma Miller in Oliver’s; they have similar roles in that they pretty much help in every part of the project. If images need working up, they can do that, or if copy needs type-setting they also do that – basically they are indispensable.

Kirk, Fru and Jonny help in Oliver’s studio and were great help in getting the art in good shape and Rory Jeffers is our go to with design related riddles we can’t solve ourselves.

Betsy: Finally, after all of this, what’s next for the two of you?

Sam & Oliver: The way we work best is to block out a section of time (away from it all) and then see what strange and interesting ideas crawl out of our heads. So, what’s most likely next is a trip away.

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Utterly delightful! Many thanks to Sam and Oliver for taking the time to answer these questions. Special thanks as well to Tracy Miracle and the team at Candlewick Press for putting this all together.

The Dictionary Story is out now, wherever the finest of possible books are lent or sold.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Interviews