John Bartlett (publisher)

John Bartlett (June 14, 1820 – December 3, 1905) was an American writer and publisher whose best known work, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, has been continually revised and reissued for a century after his death.

Bartlett was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to William Bartlett and Susan Thacher. His father was a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims Love Brewster, a founder of the town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts; Elder William Brewster, the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony; and John Alden, who was hired as a cooper in Southampton, England, just before the voyage to America and who along with the Brewsters were signers of the Mayflower Compact. His mother was a direct descendant of Anthony and Elizabeth Thacher who were the sole survivors of a terrible shipwreck on August 14, 1635 in which twenty one passengers including their four children were drowned. Thacher Island, a small island off Cape Ann on the Massachusetts coast in the United States is named after them.

A very bright boy, he was reading at age three and had read the entire Bible by nine. He finished school at age sixteen and went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked for the University Bookstore that served Harvard. By age twenty-nine he owned the store. Known for his memory for quotations and trivia, "Ask John Bartlett" became a byword in the community when someone was stumped.

He began keeping a commonplace book of quotations to answer queries and in 1855 privately printed the first edition of his Familiar Quotations. That edition of 258 pages contained entries from 169 authors. One-third of the book was quotations from the Bible and from the works of William Shakespeare, most of the balance being lines from the great English poets.

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