Ten paperbacks on language, mind and method — the working library of a field linguist rather than a run of any one publisher. Four are from the Pelican linguistics series that David Crystal advised on and partly wrote: his own Linguistics (1971), J. D. O’Connor’s Phonetics (1973) and Geoffrey Leech’s Semantics (1974) share a cover design built from the sentence “the linguist saw the pelican”, set first in IPA, then as a phrase-structure derivation, then as a tree. Beside them sit Mario Pei’s Glossary of Linguistic Terminology, published as a Doubleday Anchor Original in 1966 and, unusually, first published in paperback.
The rest come at language from the outside. Luria and Yudovich’s study of twins whose speech was delayed, Köhler on Gestalt psychology, Pribram’s Adaptation reader — which opens with Freud on aphasia and Jakobson on aphasic impairments — Judith Greene on thinking and language, Asimov on the brain, and Audrey Richards’s Malinowski-prefaced study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu. Together they map what a linguist of the 1970s read around the edges of the discipline: neurology, psychology, anthropology.
The books were donated by Prof. Ronald P. Schaefer, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a scholar of Emai, an Edoid language of Edo State, whose gift also brought the Library its runs of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, the Journal of West African Languages, Studies in African Linguistics and Linguistic Inquiry. One volume carries the donation’s provenance on its face: the copy of Phonetics is signed by Schaefer and still wears the price sticker of the Bendel Book Depot — ₦3.40 — bought in Nigeria, in the state that was then Emai country, during the fieldwork that produced his grammars.
They are held at OlongoAfrica pending placement in a specific library.
