Faulkner's egyptian Dictionary, along with Gardiners Egyptian Grammar, is one of the two key works in the library of any scholar of middle egyptian. Both are important works for the student, but I, having given up studying egyptian some years ago, still look through Faulkner on occasions simply in order to turn the pages of an immense and pioneering piece of scholarship which would otherwise languish rather forgotten.
Faulkner, writing in a time before the development of Egyptian typefaces, hand wrote each page of the disctionary in a beautiful neat hand. The disctionary is therefore one of the few works still in publication which could be considered a "hand written book". So what? A million medieval monks spent their times in the copying of concordances and the illumination of bibles. True. But they were working in their mother tongue - Latin for the most part. Faulkner was working in a language which was almost entirely unknown and undocumented. Each one of his entries must therefore have been the result of a small but significant measure of careful scholarship- and one that has clearly stood the test of other academics' critisms. If you are a student of Egyptian, you probably already have this book. But even if you aren't, buy it anyway, because it is one of the most unusual curiosities in the literary world.