The Long, Happy Life of ‘Bartlett’s Quotations’ | AMERICAN HERITAGE

On August 4, 1855, John Bartlett published his "Familiar Quotations.". An excerpt from the article:

"NO ONE IN 1855 could have foreseen that a modest little volume of 258 pages, bound in cardboard and the size of a postcard, would mushroom into the immense tome of 1600 pages that serves as a cornerstone of most libraries in the English-speaking world. Familiar Quotations was the creation of John Bartlett, for whom—to paraphrase Melville’s remark about the whaleship being Ishmael’s Yale and Harvard—the University Book Store in Cambridge was college.


Bartlett was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1820, graduated at sixteen from the local public school, and turned from the family tradition of seafaring to bookselling. At twenty-nine he became the proprietor of the University Book Store, which gave him his start. He had already developed a reputation for erudition, which caused professors and students alike to “ask John Bartlett” about a book, an author, or a quotation. He found it useful to keep a commonplace book, which became the basis for a collection of the most popular quotations arranged chronologically and with the sources given. As a service to his friends and clients, he published it himself at age thirty-five in an edition of one thousand copies. His brief preface told the reader that “the object of this work is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become ‘household words.’”

The first edition of Familiar Quotations quoted from 169 authors. The Bible and Shakespeare took up about a third of the text; the balance was chiefly English poetry—with Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Byron leading the way. There was a scattering of prose from Milton, Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Macaulay, and one maxim from La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. No Blake, Shelley, or various other authors who could not have been much upon the tongue in the mid-nineteenth century. A mere handful of Americans was included—Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a neighbor), James Russell Lowell (close friend and whist partner)—and a line each from “Hail, Columbia,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “The Old Oaken Bucket. There were no quotations from Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, or even Emerson (who made it by the third edition three years later). Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass that same year, and Thoreau’s Walden had appeared the year before, but neither would be in Familiar Quotations until the tenth edition, in 1914.

Bartlett’s venture was a success. In 1863 he joined Little, Brown and Company, which issued the fourth edition of his book that same year and has published all subsequent editions. In 1878 Bartlett became a senior partner of Little, Brown and edited six more enlarged editions of Familiar Quotations . Harvard awarded him an honorary degree, A.M., in 1871, and he was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1889 he retired from the firm to work on his Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works and Plays , which was published in 1894. He died in 1905, at the age of eighty-five."