My bookshelves are crowded, and I sometimes think about off-loading, purging, thinking in passing “well, I’ll never read that again.” Then I wake up, slap myself briskly, and realize that in a sense my books are the architecture of the house my mind lives in. Each one has built the way I think. Why would I remove any part of the structure, whether it’s decorative or structural? Anything at all might be a load-bearing wall.
My reference section actually could hold up a wall. I am what you might call “tome-oriented”. For my weighty sources, I prefer actual weight. At 1404 pages, my sixteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations must go four pounds in the hand.
It has a curious history.
Thomas Bartlett of Cambridge, Massachusetts (b. 1820) was first a bookbinder’s apprentice, then a bookstore clerk, and then a bookstore owner. Of course he was. He gained a reputation for an excellent memory and the capacity to answer questions about who said what, when, and where. In 1855, as a service to his customers and friends, he self-published a 258-page, postcard-sized book he called A Collection of Familiar Quotations. The bulk of the content was prose and verse quotations, chiefly from the Bible, Shakespeare, and British writers. Some Americans were included, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell.
The American writers were his neighbors in Cambridge. Let’s think of them dropping by the bookstore. Longfellow’s Hiawatha was published in that same year, so let’s imagine his new book on sale and the author stopping by to check its placement on the shelf, or perhaps it was in the window, part of a display marked “Local Authors.” Longfellow, Lowell, and a stack of Bartlett’s new books. The rest of the print run, we can suppose, would have been in the back room.
Bartlett wrote in his 1855 preface 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’.” A more recent editor says the original criterion “now extends to quotations chosen as well for their literary power, intellectual and historical significance, originality, and timeliness.” Shakespeare and the Bible are still central.
Bartlett eventually joined the Boston publishing house of Little, Brown and Company, which took over subsequent editions and has kept it on the list ever since. The nineteenth edition was published in 2022.
After a few warm-up stretches, I like to wrestle my 1992 edition down from the shelf for browsing, choosing a writer I know, and reading for bits I don’t. I knew this from Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens): “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
But, just below that entry, from a card sent to a Brooklyn church’s Young People’s Society in 1901 appears this sterling advice, as fresh now as it was 123 years ago. “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.”
And only one page later, from Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (as in Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore):
“Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
Written in 1878 and still true. Thank you, Mr. Clemens and Sir Gilbert. And thank you, Mr. Bartlett.
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I am indebted to the sixteenth and nineteenth editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and particularly former editor Justin Kaplan. The nineteenth edition is in the collection of the public library, and circulates. Be prepared to heft.
Photo by the author.