Both dictionary and paratext research have emerged recently as widely-recognised research areas of intrinsic interest. This collection represents an attempt to place dictionaries within the paratextual context for the first time. This volume covers paratextual concerns, including dictionary production and use, questions concerning compilers, publishers, patrons and subscribers, and their cultural embedding generally. This book raises questions such as who compiled dictionaries and what cultural, linguistic and scientific notions drove this process. What influence did the professional interests, life experience, and social connexions of the lexicographer have? Who published dictionaries and why, and what do the forematter, backmatter, and supplements tell us? Lexicographers edited, adapted and improved earlier works, leaving copies with marginalia which illuminate working methods. Individual copies offer a history of ownership through marginalia, signatures, dates, places, and library stamps. Further questions concern how dictionaries were sold, who patronised them, subscribed to them, and how they came to various libraries.

This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels, and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking, and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organization. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis, and cultural studies.