Ilan Sta­vans is the pub­lish­er of Rest­less Books and a pas­sion­ate lover of dic­tio­nar­ies, with a col­lec­tion of over three hun­dred now housed in his per­son­al col­lec­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. He has pub­lished an assort­ment of books about lan­guage, includ­ing Spang­lish: The Mak­ing of a New Amer­i­can Lan­guage (2003), Dic­tio­nary Days: A Defin­ing Pas­sion (2005), Res­ur­rect­ing Hebrew (2008), and How Yid­dish Changed Amer­i­ca and How Amer­i­ca Changed Yid­dish (2020). He serves as a con­sul­tant to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and lives in Amherst, Mass.