10 parts plus supplement in 13 volumes, 4to. Original half maroon morocco gilt (various light rubbing and wear). Provenance: Thomas Hardy (bookplates in Vols. I-X Part 1, see below) -- John Gideon Wilson (1876-1963), Chairman and Managing Director of J. & E. Bumpus, Ltd. Bookshop (manuscript note on Bumpus stationery dated 16 August 1900 tipped into vol. I, pencil note in Supplement, sold Sotheby's London, 14 December 1978, lot 23). [Note: The 1978 sale of this set included 12 volumes of 13 only, comprising Vols. I-X Part 1 and the Supplement only. The missing volume from that sale, Vol. X Part 2 is now present and supplied from another copy belonging to Bruce Campbell Hopper with his stamp.]

THOMAS HARDY'S COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY WITH HIS AUTOGRAPH NOTES IN ELEVEN VOLUMES OF "WORDS OMITTED" written in pencil on the rear free endpaper of Volumes I through X Part 1 comprising 96 new definitions on 113 lines with a few corrections and emendations. Definitions include:  "Button-crawler = the woodlouse (in some parts of Dorset); Curp, kerp = to speck "up country", with a London accent; ankle-beater = a person who knocks his ankles together in walking." 

According to estimates from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library, Thomas Hardy contributed "1,423 quotations in the new OED, of which 83 are earliest quoted usages" (see enclosed letter). Hardy corresponded with editor James Augustus Henry Murray about his Oxford English Dictionary between 1891 and 1913. "At least eleven letters, mostly on British English dialect words, are known to have passed between them from 1891 to 1913: six from Murray, all of them now held in the Dorset History Centre on behalf of Dorset Museum, and five from Hardy, three of which are held in the Archives of Oxford University Press" (Murray Scriptorum, Introduction). A SUPERB ASSOCIATION COPY.