In Print

In the early days of the OEDILF, some spoke of print publication as the project’s final aim. Six months in, we already had over 6000 approved limericks, which if we could fit three on a page (a reasonable estimate, if we include notes) would fill a 2000-page volume. No one would publish such a volume, buy it, or read it. Edward Lear published more than one book of limericks in his lifetime, and his total published output was 212.

The project, it was already clear, wasn’t about creating a single perfect and complete book with “OEDILF” stamped on the spine. Our main form of publication was and is online. Members’ limericks are electronically published as soon as they’re submitted, and are given greater publicity on the front page when they’re approved. We correct them before approval through workshopping.

The “complete” OEDILF will only ever exist on the web. The web is fluid; it can be corrected, updated, and revised on the fly. A website is a process as much as a product. We should be most concerned with doing the OEDILF, not with what will happen when it’s done—not when that point is decades away.

Fixating on print publication for the OEDILF, then, isn’t the best use of our energies. We’ve made a big and impressive (to some people) online thing. It would be impossible to create an equally big and impressive printed thing, and a less-big printed thing would risk being less impressive, even to those particular people. If someone came up with a science-themed collection drawn from a dictionary in haiku form, I might glance at it in a bookshop, but I doubt I’d buy it. To be honest, the same would probably be true of a limerick equivalent if I weren’t involved myself.

Meanwhile, we have a website whose membership numbers several hundred, most of whom have read or will read quite a lot of each other’s limericks. Our members must represent a substantial part of all the people in the world who are or would be more than passingly interested in what we do. I’m not sorry to have only fellow OEDILFers as readers: I’m grateful to have found exactly the right kind of readers.

Let’s not forget why the OEDILF and countless other esoteric websites work: because the web is excellent at connecting and concentrating groups of people who would never encounter each other in their local settings. The esoteric, even eccentric nature of our mission is its appeal to a select few, and it’s why I agree with our Editor-in-Chief that the project has legs: a few more select few are born every day. If there’s still a web in 2208, there’s a chance that there will still be an OEDILF, and that the limerick-loving lexicographers of the 23rd century will occasionally see our work—a higher chance, I reckon, than if a thousand slim volumes had been sold back in 2010 and all but a handful had ended up in landfill.

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from January 2005—July 2008.