My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games.
Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules.
And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is more or less where I place my husband, 130 years ago, deep in the Boy’s Own Newspaper.
The marketing attraction of a compendium was exploited by stationers during the first world war who sold a notepad, envelopes and blotting paper as a ‘compendium’; it was in great demand among soldiers. A character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938) buys a compendium of ‘lightly ruled violet paper, purple lined envelopes’.
The related adjective compendious entails two elements: being comprehensive though brief, or else containing the substance within a small compass. The Royalist poet Richard Lovelace declared: ‘Compendious Snayl! thou seem’st to me,/ Large Euclids strickt Epitome.’
However, I’ve noticed recently that compendious has been reduced to one element: the encyclopaedic. The Times mentioned ‘Gavin Wallace, then head of the literary panel, whose knowledge of the Scottish writing scene was compendious’. The Daily Mail said of the Artful Dodger in an imagined afterlife as a surgeon: ‘How he acquired his compendious medical knowledge is never quite explained.
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