The Whole World in a Book

IU Libraries Lilly Library is thrilled to announce an exhibition honoring legendary dictionary collector Madeline Kripke. When Kripke died in 2020, she left behind a remarkable collection of over 20,000 dictionaries, as well as a rich manuscript archive about dictionaries, her life, and her collecting. In 2021, the Lilly Library acquired the collection, keeping it intact and available for all to study. The spring 2026 exhibition The Whole World in a Book: Celebrating Madeline Kripke's Dictionary Collection shares some of the collection publicly for the first time, curated by IU Provost Professor of English Michael Adams and Lilly Library Executive Associate Director Erika Dowell.

Madeline Kripke believed that dictionaries are an especially useful lens for observing culture. She focused on slang and other marginalized language, and she charted the roles of dictionaries in everyday life. She collected, not merely to possess, but to share what she saw with scholars and the public, and The Whole World in a Book realizes her ambition to do so.