In the early 1920s, Ludwig Wittgenstein taught at a series of elementary schools across Austria. In 1926, he published Dictionary for Elementary Schools. It would be the second of only two works that he published during his lifetime—the first being Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

“For six years, Wittgenstein instructed the children of farmers and factory workers in the rural communities of Trattenbach, Puchberg am Schneeberg, and Otterthal in Lower Austria. He was responsible for teaching students in grades four through six all subjects, from writing to mathematics, science to music. His service in World War I and his long struggle to publish the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a work he considered to be a conclusive answer to the extant questions of philosophy—had alienated him from academic philosophy. Having grown up in one of the wealthiest families in Europe, he had renounced his significant inheritance a few years earlier: he sought an ascetic life. His self-imposed exile from the world of philosophy and Cambridge (where Wittgenstein studied and taught before and after this period) thus rendered his years as a schoolteacher an ‘entirely rural affair.’

“Throughout 1925, he worked on putting together a small dictionary of German words for his students, which would become known as the Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Dictionary for Elementary Schools). It was published by a Viennese press in the fall of 1926. This was a few months after a harrowing corporal punishment incident in which Wittgenstein struck a student, causing the student to collapse. He abruptly abandoned his teaching career and moved back to Vienna. The dictionary Wittgenstein produced would become the second of only two works that was published in his lifetime. The original volume of forty-two pages and nearly six thousand word entries was meant to fill a pedagogic need for his students. The two dictionaries available at the time were not up to the task: ‘One was too big and too expensive to be used by children…The other was too small and badly put together, containing many foreign words which the children were unlikely ever to use, and omitting many words commonly misspelt by children.’

“However, as one of the most eminent philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century, he could not leave behind his insatiable fascination with language and meaning in his new career. Beyond practical needs, Wittgenstein’s keen interest in how his students were learning the use of words and their spelling becomes clear through his justifications and explanations provided in the dictionary’s preface. His meticulous choices and attention to detail in how to construct the book helped to ‘guard [the student] against confusions in the best way possible.’ How does a young student learn a new word, idea, or concept when previously they were unable to use it themselves? An adult can often rely on prior concepts in relation to which a new concept makes sense, but a child learning a word or concept for the first time often does not have such prior understanding to bring to bear on a new idea. Instead, a child needs to practice and have the chance to use the word in new contexts. This lesson stuck with Wittgenstein many years later, when he wrote that ‘the usefulness of this sign must emerge from experience.’ And the dictionary was a means for his students to gain just that.”

In other news: Churches are sinking in Naples: “Researchers have identified nine buildings that require a ‘quick response’ and a further 57 places of worship that could suffer from future cavity collapses.”

The sounds of the South: “As it stands, Arts & Letters is anything but limited, with topics ranging from the death of the shopping mall to Godzilla to a one-man play about James Baldwin. A nimble ear is required for this radio program, funded by a major grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council. In nearly 80 episodes, you’ll hear actors, musicians, professors, but especially writers: poets, novelists, biographers, autobiographers, authors of short stories, fiction, nonfiction—the gamut. So, what’s the common thread? What makes something an Arts & Letters episode? ‘In a region that’s often overlooked, we wanted to focus on southern work,’ Minnick says.”

A 13th-century guide to fraud and skulduggery: “Eight centuries ago in Turkey, at a gathering of intellectuals, a Muslim sultan insisted that one of his courtiers write a book about an unlikely subject: thieves and con artists. The sultan, Rukn al-Din, had secured another such book from Spain, but he wondered: ‘What’s left out of it?’ The set-upon courtier was Jamal al-Din Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, and the commissioned Arabic work, Kashf al-asrar (Exposing Secrets), his only surviving text. But why would a powerful ruler such as Rukn al-Din, presumably safe from street-level scammers, order a guidebook about the medieval Islamic underworld? The answer is most likely nostalgie de la boue — a way, as Tom Wolfe was to argue in Radical Chic, to assert superiority over the ‘middle-class striver’s obsession with propriety and keeping up appearances’.”

The woman who built Beethoven’s piano: “The Morgan Library & Museum owns part of an original sketch of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Piano Sonata. In the margin, the British publisher Vincent Novello writes that the document was given to him by ‘Mrs. Streiker’ — ‘one of Beethoven’s oldest and most sincere friends.’ Nannette Streicher’s marginalized place in history is encapsulated in these scribbled lines. While she was indeed one of the closest friends of Beethoven, whose 250th birthday will be celebrated this December, she was also one of the finest piano builders in Europe. She owned her own company — employing her husband, Andreas Streicher, a pianist and teacher, to handle sales, bookkeeping and business correspondence.”

Johnny Depp booted from the Fantastic Beasts film franchise after losing his libel case against The Sun.

Fake hardcovers: “Recently, I paged through a friend’s copy of a just-­released bestseller in political theory. I then ordered my own copy, exactly twenty days after the book’s release. When my copy arrived, I found that it sported the same dustjacket as my friend’s, but underneath the jacket it was different. In place of a sewn binding, the pages were glued to the spine, and the cover was cruder. It wasn’t a true hardback at all, but a paperback slapped between boards. I had the same experience with another book, from a favorite established author whose new release was still riding the first wave of reviews. My purchased copy was substantially lower in quality than the one I had borrowed. I discussed it with friends, and on social media, and found that others were noticing the same thing: Respectable presses were issuing ‘fake’ hardcovers.”

Photo: Stari Most