The Devil's Dictionary (Illustrated)
★ Written by Ambrose Bierce
★ Illustrated by V. Subhash
★ Looks like any new dictionary (modern fonts, two-column pages, starting/ending words at the top of every page)
Introduction
I first read about Ambrose Bierce and his "devil's dictionary" in the Young World Saturday supplement of The Hindu newspaper. That was back when I was in school. More than a decade ago, I came across an all-text version of the dictionary on the Internet. To make it more usable, I compiled it into a PDF ebook. In 2020, after I started publishing books as a real author, I decided to illustrate the book. It will be available for sale soon. The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a great repository of brutally frank and unusually cynical descriptions for popular words and phrases in English. Initially, it appeared piecemeal in his California newspaper and was later compiled into a volume in his collected works. He was a writer of supernatural stories in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories were published in two volumes: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1892) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). The last we know of him was when he travelled to strife-torn Mexico in 1913. The Devil's Dictionary remains his most famous work.
Illustrated 2020 Version
This illustrated 2020 version by me:
- uses the original text by Bierce in its unabridged form
- including the errors and foreign-language text from the printed version
- excluding instances of '[sic]' (but marked in grayscale) and some
- errors found in the Project Guttenberg extract
- excluding three words involving Islamic faith (strictly for health reasons)
- reordering of two out-of-order words
- has 17 extremely funny caricatures featuring Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bill Gates, Don Lemon, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Tedros Adhanom... meeting the Devil
- has the easy-on-the-eye look of any new dictionary
- modern fonts
- two-column pages
- starting and ending words in the header and footer of each page
- has 160 pages
| Format | Store | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Paperback | Amazon | $9 |
| ebook (Print-replica) | Amazon | $2 |
| ebook | All ebook stores books2read.com/gag | |
Notes
- Attributions: Most of the names attributed to quotations and written works in the dictionary by Bierce are not real.
- WARNING: If you consider yourself as a woke, liberal, leftie, progressive, Socialist, Communist, Feminist... then this book is not for you.
-
Sample Definitions:
- ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
- BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
- CLAIRVOYANT, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.
- DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.
- EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state.
- FEMALE, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
- GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
- HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
- IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
Free PDF Sample
This sample is a low-resolution watermarked PDF but it is fully functional.
Download
the-devil-s-dictionary-ambrose-bierce-ebook.pdf
Size: 2 MB