The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed. The marsh was a sinister place, a jumble of slums and sin that crouched, dark and ogrelike, on the bank of the Thames just across from Westminster; few respectable Londoners would ever admit to venturing there. It was a robustly violent part of town as well —the footpad lurked in Lambeth, there had once been an outbreak of garroting, and in every crowded alley were the roughest kinds of pickpocket. Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Oliver Twist would have all seemed quite at home in Victorian Lambeth: This was Dickensian London writ large.

But it was not a place for men with guns. The armed criminal was a phenomenon little known in the Lambeth of Prime Minister Gladstone's day, and even less known in the entire metropolitan vastness of London. Guns were costly, cumbersome, difficult to use, hard to conceal. Then, as still today, the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime was thought of as somehow a very un-British act —and as something to be written about and recorded as a rarity. "Happily," proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth's weekly newspaper, "we in this country have no experience of the crime of 'shooting down,' so common in the United States."

So when a brief fusillade of three revolver shots rang out shortly after two o'clock on the moonlit Saturday morning of February 17, 1872, the sound was unimagined, unprecedented, and shocking. The three cracks —perhaps there were four —were loud, very loud, and they echoed through the cold and smokily damp night air. They were heard —and, considering their rarity, just by chance instantly recognized —by a keen young police constable named Henry Tarrant, then attached to the Southwark Constabulary's L Division.

The clocks had only recently struck two, his notes said later; he was performing with routine languor the duties of the graveyard shift, walking slowly beneath the viaduct arches beside Waterloo Railway Station, rattling the locks of the shops and cursing the bone-numbing chill.

When he heard the shots, Tarrant blew his whistle to alert any colleagues who (he hoped) might be on patrol nearby, and he began to run. Within seconds he had raced through the warren of mean and slippery lanes that made up what in those days was still called a village, and had emerged into the wide riverside swath of Belvedere Road, from whence he was certain the sounds had come.

Another policeman, Henry Burton, who had heard the piercing whistle, as had a third, William Ward, rushed to the scene. According to Burton's notes, he dashed toward the echoing sound and came across his colleague Tarrant, who was by then holding a man, as if arresting him. "Quick!" cried Tarrant. "Go to the road —a man has been shot!" Burton and Ward raced toward Belvedere Road and within seconds found the unmoving body of a dying man. They fell to their knees, and onlookers noted they had cast off their helmets and gloves and were hunched over the victim.

There was blood gushing onto the pavement —blood staining a spot that would for many months afterward be described in London's more dramatically minded papers as the location of A HEINOUS CRIME, A TERRIBLE EVENT, AN ATROCIOUS OCCURRENCE, A VILE MURDER.

The Lambeth Tragedy, the papers eventually settled upon calling it —as if the simple existence of Lambeth itself were not something of a tragedy. Yet this was a most unusual event, even by the diminished standards of the marsh dwellers.

Simon Winchester, author, journalist, and broadcaster, has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career, although he graduated from Oxford in 1966 with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, and on oil rigs in the North Sea, before joining his first newspaper in 1967. His journalistic work, mainly for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, has based him in Belfast; Washington, D.C.; New Delhi; New York; London; and Hong Kong, where he covered such stories as the Ulster crisis; the creation of Bangladesh; the fall of President Marcos; the Watergate affair; the Jonestown Massacre; the assassination of Egypt's President Sadat; the recent death and cremation of Pol Pot; and, in 1982, the Falklands War during which time he was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges. He has been a freelance writer since 1987. He now works principally as an author, although he contributes to a number of American and British magazines and journals, including Harper's, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. He was appointed Asia-Pacific editor of Condé Nast Traveler at its inception in 1987, and later becoming editor-at-large. His writings have won him several awards, including Britain's Journalist of the Year. He writes and presents television films including a series on the final colonial years of Hong Kong and on a variety of other historical topics and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program From Our Own Correspondent. Winchester also lectures widely most recently before London's Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow) and to audiences aboard the cruise liners QE2 and Seabourn Pride. His books cover a wide range of subjects, including a study of the remaining British Empire, the colonial architecture of India, aristocracy, the American Midwest, his experience of the months spent in an Argentine prison on spying charges, his description of a six-month walk through the Korean peninsula, the Pacific Ocean, and the future of China. Most recently he has written The River at the Center of the World, about China's Yangtze River; The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling The Map That Changed the World, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 was published by HarperCollins in April 2003.

His forthcoming book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, will be published by HarperCollins in Fall 2005. Distinguished French director Luc Besson will adapt The Professor and the Madman into a major motion picture. Simon Winchester lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.