Winchester’s World

“Some of them are old, some of them not at all, but that’s where I go in the evening to sit and read and forget about work,” he said.

Work, at the moment, consists of researching everything Winchester can find about the Pacific Ocean since 1950. The in-progress book is a geographic sequel to Winchester’s previous two books, Atlantic and The Men Who United the States. One snowy morning this past November, he was awash in surfing research for his book on the Pacific, using vintage copies of magazines to aid his research.

“You caught me while I’m writing the history of surfing in chapter three,” he said. “Surfing is a modern phenomenon, which was born in Tahiti and went to Hawaii. I have a lot of old books about surfing and a lot of old magazines, like a 1907 edition of the Woman’s Home Companion, which is where Jack London wrote the first well-read essay on the joys of surfing. This led to surfing becoming popular in America, Australia, South Africa, and all over the world.”

By way of explaining his acquisitiveness, Winchester clarified his writing process. After an initial idea for a book forms, he develops a structure for it, and once that is in place, he starts building a book collection of material related to the various themes.

“With The Men Who United the States, I decided the structure should be a bit more high-risk, so it would be the five classical elements of Chinese philosophies: wood, water, earth, fire, and metal. Once the structures are in place, I know what I want to research. So let us say metal—talking about America—the subjects that I wanted to cover on metal would be the telegraph, the telephone, the distribution of electricity, the television, the radio, and the Internet. I will then get whatever books I can lay my hands on that seem relevant to these discrete subjects. Many of the books are new but most of them are not. I never really purchase anything for my working library other than reading copies of books.”

Winchester estimated he has about 3,000–4,000 books in his working library and 1,000 books in his reading library. But it’s only recently that he has been able to maintain such a large book collection. For many years, Winchester traveled the world as a foreign correspondent, and before that as a geologist. In fact, the Oxford graduate’s first job landed him in west Uganda, where he was searching for copper.

“What I was particularly interested in back then was mountain climbing. I was something of an amateur climber, so I tended to read adventure stories about mountain climbing,” he recalled. “And one of the books I got from this little British Consul library in Fort Portal was a first edition of a book called Coronation Everest by James Morris, which was his account of being the London Times correspondent on the Mount Everest expedition in May 1953.”

Winchester wrote a letter to the author (now Jan Morris) asking for tips on becoming a writer. Winchester received a “tremendously nice” letter in response, which read in part, “My advice to you is quite simple, the day you receive this letter, not next week, not next month but the day you receive it, go into your offices there in Uganda, resign, come back to England, get a job on a local newspaper and write to me again.”

Incredibly, that’s just what Winchester did. After he did a stint on an oil ship in the North Sea, a newspaper in Newcastle finally hired the ambitious young journalist. From his beginnings as a general assignment writer for The Journal, Winchester launched a successful and adventurous career as a journalist for several major British newspapers, serving as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Washington, D.C., India, Argentina, China, and Hong Kong.

After Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, Winchester left Asia and moved to New York City where he turned his attention to writing books.

“Jan had always told me to write books because she said, quite reasonably, that newspaper writing is all fine and dandy but the newspaper ends up at the bottom of the parrot’s cage,” he said. “Books have a certain permanence.”

Winchester had written several books about the places he was stationed over the years as a foreign correspondent, but none had sold particularly well. And then one afternoon Winchester was reading Jonathon Green’s Chasing the Sun, a book about dictionary makers, when he had an epiphany.

“I was reading Chasing the Sun in the bath and there was a footnote or reference which said, ‘Readers of this book would of course be familiar with the story of Dr. W. Minor, the deranged American lunatic murderer, who was such a prominent contributor to the OED,’ and I sat up in the bath thinking, ‘What? I’ve never heard of this,’ but by great good fortune, I had the phone by the bath and I remembered the telephone number of the one lexicographer in the world who I knew, a woman called Elizabeth Knowles in Oxford. I rang her and I said, ‘Elizabeth, first of all I need to say that I’m ringing from my bath in America but do you know anything about W. C. Minor?’ and she said, ‘You are in luck because I probably know more about W. C. Minor than anyone in the world.’”

Winchester was off and running. He knew he had stumbled upon a sensational story. Larry Ashmead, an editor at HarperCollins, agreed, but even HarperCollins had no idea that it had a worldwide bestseller on its hands. Published in 1998, The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary is the story of Minor, a retired surgeon and hospitalized lunatic, and his significant contributions to the OED under the editorship of Sir James Murray (the professor of the book’s title). HarperCollins ordered an initial print run of 10,000 copies, but the book would return again and again to the printer, eventually selling several million.

In 2014, The Professor and The Madman also earned the distinction of being produced in a fine illustrated edition by the London-based Folio Society. The Folio Society used the British title for the book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a decision that Winchester initially resisted but came to accept because the core readership of the Folio Society remains British. He was, however, was very pleased with the result.

“I think they’ve done a beautiful, beautiful job. I’m very happy with it and, as you probably know, it’s a great honor for a living writer to be chosen by them. So I was completely thrilled.”

Winchester has published ten books since The Professor and The Madman, covering everything from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to a biography of Joseph Needham, the Cambridge scientist who chronicled China’s earliest technological innovations, to the story of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the titular character in Alice in Wonderland. Winchester’s most recent efforts have been centered on American history, and once his Pacific volume is complete, he said he is contemplating a book on the nature and history of precision.

When researching these books, Winchester also visits special collections libraries that hold unique material he cannot buy or borrow.

“For instance, the other day, I was in chapter two of this [Pacific] book, which relates to the incorporation into the Pacific community of a lot of people who were marginalized: Australian aboriginals, Maoris, Native Americans, Indians, and so forth, but also 5,500 Japanese, who renounced their citizenship at the end of World War II but wanted it back after they realized they made a mistake. As a result, there was an immensely long legal battle back and forth against the US Department of Justice, which they eventually won in 1958 or ’59. The papers relating to those cases are all in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, so I went there.”

However, the specific working library he assembles for each book project not only puts the relevant material to hand in his own library but also satisfies the collector’s bug. An inveterate collector, Winchester has several areas of interest. His stamp collection, for example, is quite distinct. He explained, “It’s very specialized, but I collect stamps from the Treaty Ports in China in the 1890s when the British had a post office in Shanghai and Xiamen and places like that. So they all have rather attractive little stamps.” Railway timetables also entice him—“Old Bradshaw’s and old official railway guides, I have a fair number of those,” he admitted. And maps, of course. “I love maps, I’ve got a very large collection of maps, particularly admiralty charts. I just think admiralty charts—particularly the ones produced by the British Admiralty—are so beautiful.”

But perhaps the crown jewel of Winchester’s collections is the first edition of Coronation Everest that Winchester read in a tent in Uganda. It changed his life. After encouraging him to quit his career in copper mining, Morris took the young Winchester under her wing. Winchester sent his early articles to Morris, who would return them with annotations in an attempt to turn him “into a halfway decent writer.” Their friendship has continued to grow and flourish throughout the years.

“She is one of my best friends. She’s now eighty-seven years old. She stays with us every time she comes to New York. And she is the person that single-handedly changed my life,” he said. “So for many years after with the Guardian, sort of tongue-in-cheek, I would say to any potential applicant for a reporter’s job, ‘It’s easy to get a job in the Guardian. All you have to do is to get a not very good degree in geology from Oxford and make good friends with a transsexual.’”