(2 of 2)
Stocky and squarejawed, Anderson Baten paced back & forth in his Manhattan hotel room last week with the energy of a man who cannot relax. "Never," he declaimed, "was so much work done by a single individual! It was the word 'complete' which kept me going. Sometimes I walked the floor for an hour asking myself, 'Baten, why are you doing this?' But I said to myself, 'Baten, you are an average man with the ability to work and a physical constitution capable of taking gigantic punishment. Baten, you were put in the world to do this work.'"
Baten attributes his stamina to his weight-lifting physique and to the vegetables fed him by his dietician wife. Only his eyes, behind thick spectacles, threatened to fail him.
"Oh, I tell you," he recalled, "my faith was tested when I reached the 'S's.' Eye specialists told me I would have to stop if I wanted to retain my sight. But I came to New York to see a doctor and went up the Empire State Building and as I stood there looking out over the great city something said to me, 'Baten, you're big, too. Go home and finish that dictionary.' "
Five months of proofreading lie between Anderson Baten and the final appearance of his tremendous volume. But already his thoughts are running ahead to a philosophical novel, about the length of Anthony Adverse.