Rex Stout’s Gambit is a mystery novel featuring the famously fat detective Nero Wolfe.  Stout’s title refers to a sacrificial move in chess, and his book employs an interesting opening gambit itself: it shows Wolfe sacrificing a dictionary by burning it in the fireplace—to be precise, sacrificing the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary.  Wolfe, a language precisionist, has condemned the reference work to the flames for being too permissive, for example sanctioning the interchangeable use of the verbs “imply” and “infer.”  The detective tears the scandalous pages out, drops them into the fireplace, and asks his legman Archie Goodwin if the dictionary binding will burn.  “Sure,” Archie answers, “it’s buckram.”  That brings us to the question of exactly what buckram is.

If Wolfe had looked the word up in Webster’s New International he would have found a complicated history, and a still more complicated history in the OED.  “Buckram” goes back through Middle English and Old French forms to, possibly, the place name Bokhara in Central Asia, unless it’s the name Bulgaria, or maybe the Italian verb bucherare, meaning (as the OED says) “to pierce full of holes,” or perhaps an Arabic phrase . . .   Whatever its source, the word was originally the name of a fine linen cloth, then a coarser cloth stiffened with glue, the kind of thing that could be used to bind books or line fabrics.  The figurative sense is “something hard or stiff.”  One of the most admirable and engagingly written of all reference works, the late Alan Davidson’s North Atlantic Seafood, reports that a molting crab hardening beyond the soft-shell stage is called a “buckram.”

In the sixteenth century all sorts of people wore buckram cloth.  In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Prince Hal’s drinking companion Falstaff, a figure nearly as fat as Nero Wolfe and much more unruly, claims that he was robbed by two rogues in buckram suits.  The claim is all a lie, a con, and ever since then “men in buckram” has been shorthand for something made up.  “Look for the men in buckram, my dear sir, look for the men in buckram,” says another fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ stories.  Lord Peter is implying—not inferring—that a suspect’s story is full of holes.

What might a dictionary be bound in, if not buckram?   Leather, as Archie notes.  Scoring a point off his boss, he recalls that Wolfe ordered the New International in burnable buckram, not resistant leather, and so knew he was going to burn it even before he read it.  And what sort of leather would be used to bind a dictionary?  Why, Morocco leather, flexible and often dyed red, famous for its use in the bookbinding trade.  And here the pertinent cultural reference would not be to Shakespeare but to a modern classic, Road to Morocco, one of the On the Road movies made in the 1940s with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.  These two camel-mounted, sand-dune-crossing cut-ups amuse each other and the audience with a song that unforgettably brings together the worlds of travel, bookbinding, and lexicography:

We’re off on the road to Morocco . . .
We certainly do get around,
Like Webster’s Dictionary we’re Morocco bound!

But why not watch them singing it?