Dictionary of Pseudonyms: Third Edition
Dictionary of Pseudonyms: Third Edition

By Adrian Room

Published by McFarland, 1998.

This is a 7" X 10" cloth-bound book of 404 pages including the bibliography.

It's a dictionary that lets you look up the name of a famous person, whether a writer, politician, artist, or major musician, and find out their real, or original given, name, and get a sentence or two with the story behind the person's adopted name.

Owing to the many issues surrounding such a project, the introduction is long and has seven different chapters to it.

A book like this has to be somewhat arbitrary in deciding whom to include and whom to exclude. When it is the work of a single person, the decisions are likely to be less systematic than they are dependent on the knowledge and interests of the author. So, when I noticed that Hakim Bey, the pseudonym for Peter Lamborn Wilson, is not included, I have no way of knowing whether it is because the influential anarchist writer is not known to the author of the dictionary or because his identity is still too controversial. (As Hakim Bey he is known as the theorist of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, or TAZ; as Peter Lamborn Wilson he is known as a literary proponent of pedophilia. The identity of the two names in one person is important to his intellectual biography and is a controversial issue among many anarchists, who tend to value anonymity.)

Pseudonyms shared by anarchist, situationist and neoist literary movements, such as Luther Blissett, Monty Cantsin and Karen Elliott, which present an interesting problem in name authority, are also not included.

The scope of the book spans recorded history, but is a bit too Eurocentric. (The introductory section even refers to first names as "Christian names.")

Still, this is a valuable and interesting resource.