DAVID SHULMAN DIES: THE BIBLIOGRAPHER OF CRYPTOLOGY

Cryptologia, Jan 2005 by Kahn, David

David Shulman, the premier bibliographer of cryptology, died 30 October 2004 at Victory Memorial Hospital, Brooklyn. He was two weeks short of his 92nd birthday.

Shulman, who was born 12 November 1912 in New York City, became interested in ciphers as a boy from articles and puzzles in the Red Magic section of the New York newspaper the World. He attended the College of the City of New York, studying frequently at the New York Public Library. He became a member of the National Puzzlers League and, in 1932, a charter member of its offshoot, the American Cryptogram Association.

During World War II, Shulman served as a cryptanalyst in the Army Signal Corps in Alaska. Before and after it, he bought books on cryptology with the help of a Philadelphia collector, W. D. Witt, part of whose collection he bought after Witt died. This formed the nucleus of Shulman's own collection. While at the New York Public Library, he had seen its excellent collection, and determined to begin his own bibliography. Shulman realized that a short 1918 list by the great American cryptologist William F. Friedman must have missed many books and that an extensive 1936 bibliography by the French criminologist Edmond Locard had also omitted many early works. Then an 18-page listing by James D. Volts in 1938 so incensed him with its errors and omissions that he determined to produce a more complete and accurate listing. So his monumental work began.

He searched the indices of journals and found many articles in popular magazines that had not been known to previous researchers, including Joseph S. Galland's 209-page, elegant An Historical and Analytical Bibliography of the Literature of Cryptology, published by Northwestern University in 1945. He kept his notes on 3 × 5-inch cards and transferred these to a typed listing, which he retyped time and again as he discovered new items. Its more than 3,000 entries were finally published as a 390-page photographic copy by Garland in 1976. It was reviewed by this writer in Cryptologia, 1 (January 1977), 27-41, with his reply on 43-45, by Julian Moore in the (London) Times Literary Supplement (17 March 1978), 306, and by Albert C. Leighton in a 1979 review in an unidentified publication. Though much has been added to the bibliography of cryptology in the almost three decades since then, for which he compiled a 334-page manuscript addition, no work has superseded his, many of whose entries give locations for many of the early, and therefore rare, works.

He also bought and (rarely) sold books on cryptology. Over many years - and time is essential for a good assemblage - he developed one of the finest collections on the subject in the world. Several years ago, he donated it to the New York Public Library, where it reposes, as yet uncatalogued, in its rare book room. Many people thought this was only appropriate, for Shulman had visited that library almost every day it was open, mining his inexhaustible riches for his work as a puzzle and contest editor and compiler for several New York newspapers, including perhaps the Journal-American. He wrote a column on puzzles for the New York World-Telegram and for the King Features Syndicate. He played tennis and coached a boys' basketball team.

Shulman for many years was interested in language, and contributed articles to several scholarly magazines, particularly on word origins. He contributed some 5,000 citations to the Oxford English Dictionary that antedated citations of early word use, thus pushing back the dates of the first known use of a word in English. The then editor of that great dictionary, Dr. Robert Burchfield, said that Shulman's citations are among the most used in the supplement because they always give full bibliographic data and are checked against the original O. E. D. to make sure that his antedate its. Shulman's name is enshrined in the preface to the second edition and in each of its Addition Series volumes. And when Burchfield came to the United States on a business trip, one of the people he wanted to visit was Dave Shulman. Shulman kept up these investigations until his death. In his New York Times obituary of Shulman on 7 November 2004, Doug Martin said that Shulman "avoided excessive modesty, letting it drop that he was at least temporarily the last word on words that included 'The Great White Way,' 'Big Apple,' 'doozy.' 'hoochie-cooche'." One philologist said that Shulman's most pioneering effort concerned "hot dog," which he found was college slang before being used to mean a sausage.

A couple of years ago, the television show "60 Minutes" featured him and his work in one of its segments. Several years ago, the president of the New York Public Library, Dr. Paul Leclerc, who had hailed Shulman as one of the assets of the library, recognized the importance of his work by giving him a desk in the south Rose Reading Room. Here Shulman pursued his researches into cryptology, the history of words, the history of baseball, and Steve Brodie, the man who is said to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.