OED appeals to the public to track down a bibliographic mystery

On last Friday's show, Rachel Maddow admitted to being a "total dork" about the Oxford English Dictionary. She closed the show with a piece -- titled "Refer Madness" which made me chuckle :-) -- about a bibliographic mystery currently stumping OED staff. In checking their citations, they've come across 51 definitions -- including "Fringy," "Chapelled," "Scavage," and "Whinge" -- in which the first cited reference for those words is in a book entitled "Meanderings of Memory" by Nightlark. The problem is that nobody at OED can actually find the book. I looked quickly in our Searchworks catalog, and in Worldcat to no avail.

So they're appealing for help from the public in hunting down this book. Check out the comments to the OED story to see how far the public has gotten. There's much more to the story in this New Yorker article "Have you seen this book? an OED mystery" by Sasha Weiss. Can you help?