Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
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| Author | John Bartlett |
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| Country | United States |
| Published | 1855 Little, Brown and Company |
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, often simply called Bartlett's, is an American reference work that is the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotations. The book was first issued in 1855 and is currently in its eighteenth edition, published in 2012.
The book arranges its entries by author, rather than by subject, as many other quotation collections, and enters the authors chronologically by date of birth rather than alphabetically. Within years, authors are arranged alphabetically and quotations are arranged chronologically within each author's entry, followed by "attributed" remarks whose source in the author's writings has not been confirmed. The book contains a thorough keyword index and details the source of each quotation.
John Bartlett, who ran the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was frequently asked for information on quotations and he began a commonplace book of them for reference. In 1855, he privately printed his compilation as A Collection of Familiar Quotations. This first edition contained 258 pages of quotations by 169 authors, chiefly the Bible, William Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Bartlett wrote in the fourth edition that "it is not easy to determine in all cases the degree of familiarity that may belong to phrases and sentences which present themselves for admission; for what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another."
The book was a great success, and Bartlett issued three more editions before joining the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown, and Company. Bartlett rose to be the senior partner of the firm and supervised nine editions of the work before his death in 1905, the work selling over 300,000 copies. The seventh edition had appeared in 1875, the eighth edition in 1882, and the ninth in 1891. The tenth edition, however, would not appear for more than twenty years.
Edited by Nathan Haskell Dole, the tenth edition (1914) was much like its predecessors. The book began with quotations originally in English, arranging them chronologically by author (Geoffrey Chaucer was the first entry, Mary Frances Butts the last). These quotes were chiefly from literary sources. A "miscellaneous" section follows of quotations in English from politicians and scientists (such as "fifty-four forty or fight!"). A section of "translations" follows, consisting mainly of lines from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The last section was devoted to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Quotations were arranged in a single column.
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