Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition) [Hardcover]

John Bartlett (Author), Justin Kaplan (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations | Publication Date: November 2002

First published in 1855, BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS has been completely updated and revised for the seventeenth edition by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Justin Kaplan. This 17th edition, under Kaplan's splendid direction, contains over 20,000 quotations, representing 2,500 authors, 90 of whom are new to BARTLETT'S. New comers include Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Kushner, Tammy Wynette, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Frank O'Hara, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Mother Teresa, Jacques Cousteau, Rudolph Giuliani, Alfred Hitchcock, L. M. Montgomery, Eric Ambler, Jerry Seinfeld, J.K. Rowling, Katharine Graham, and Emma Goldman. With quotations presented in chronological order, in the famous BARTLETT'S tradition, BARTLETT'S gives the reader a vast panorama of the world, from the ancient Egyptians to the latest movie, from the inspirational and the beautiful to the sardonic and the downright funny.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This canonical reference work, originally published in 1855, soldiers on, seeking out memorable quotations in the midst of these dark ages of rhetoric. Since the last edition in 1992, the pickings have been slim; recent selections are weighted toward bon mots from pop cultural phenomena (Jerry Seinfeld, Larry Clark, J. K. Rowling), irritating catchphrases ("Show me the money!") and laughable attempts to evade rather than achieve clear expression ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"). Fortunately there is still Bartlett's great trove of five millennia of timeless poetry, prose, oratory and epigrams, arranged chronologically and indexed by author and thematic keywords. Kingsley Amis, Mother Teresa and Katharine Graham all make their first appearance in this edition, while the entries for Edith Wharton, Bob Dylan and Vladimir Nabokov have been expanded. This volume should serve as both admonishment and inspiration to writers and toastmasters alike.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

According to his entry in American National Biography, "ask John Bartlett" was once a common answer to questions in the environs of Harvard College. Bartlett went to work in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore when he was 16, and "his copious memory and love of books soon had university faculty and students using him as a ready reference tool." His notebook of common phrases and quotations eventually became A Collection of Familiar Quotations, which he had privately printed in 1855. By the time he died in 1905, the collection had gone through nine editions. Almost 100 years and eight editions later, people still ask John Bartlett when they are seeking the source of a common phrase or hoping to dress up a speech with a pithy saying.

The seventeenth edition of Bartlett's has 25,000 quotations from 2,500 authors. It follows in the path of its predecessors by adhering to certain traditions yet also strives to remain relevant and up-to-date. Bartlett's original collection relied heavily on literary sources, such as the Bible and Shakespeare, and these, as current editor Kaplan tells us in his preface, "are still major components." Structurally, arrangement is still chronological and access is abetted by an index of authors and a very detailed keyword index. But for this edition, hundreds of "purely mechanical, nonsubstantive cross-reference and footnotes" have been eliminated, and full citations are used in place of the often-confusing Ibid. And Bartlett's continues to widen its net beyond canonical sources, casting about for material from culture both high and low. New among the quoted are Maya Angelou, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Rudy Giuliani, Frank McCourt, Robert McNamara, and Jerry Seinfeld. Selections from Charles Darwin, Bob Dylan, and Virginia Woolf, among others, have been expanded. Some authors, such as popular eighteenth-century English writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, have been excised, although cutting has not been as deep for this edition as it was for the sixteenth, also edited by Kaplan.

There are hundreds of other quotation books from which to choose. Among those that are comparable in size to Bartlett's, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (5th ed., 1999) is arranged alphabetically by author, and Random House Webster's Quotationary (1999) is arranged by subject. In addition to these general anthologies, there are books of quotations by women and by African Americans; books of humorous or religions quotations; and books for quotations about movies or sports (for a rundown of some recent examples, see "Other People's Words: Recent Quotation Books," in our July 2002 issue). Strictly speaking, the new Bartlett's may not be a necessary purchase for libraries that have the sixteenth edition and a good array of other fairly current titles. But because it is one of the handful of reference staples that patrons are likely to ask for by name, no self-respecting library should be without it. RBB
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1472 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 17 edition (November 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316084603
• ISBN-13: 978-0316084604
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 2 x 10.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Education & Reference > Encyclopedias > Antiques & Collectibles
  • #75 in Books > Education & Reference > Quotations

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable, authoritative, probably the "best", October 6, 2003

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition) (Hardcover)

Comparing this, the 17th edition of the best known and arguably the most authoritative collection of quotations ("familiar," memorable, or just plain quotable--you choose the terminology), to its predecessor the 16th edition, the question arises, should you upgrade? I own both books and have examined them in some detail. I have used the 16th for many years.

The 17th is set in a new typeface which is both slightly narrower and less bold than that of the 16th. The result is a cleaner look to the pages and more white space. The difference in the number of pages--1431 for the new, 1405 for the old--is slight, and a little misleading. In fact the new edition has more entries--"around one hundred" authors are quoted for the first time, and some authors have additional entries. But the text in the 17th actually takes up less room. Its Index, for example, although it has more entries, has only 564 pages to 608 for the 16th. This is accomplished mainly because the narrower type is also shorter, allowing more entries per column.

The question then is, is the smaller type harder to read? Surprisingly, I would say no. The new type is sharper, crisper and, because the pages have a cleaner appearance, is easier on the eyes. I have a strong suspicion that the publishers--whose investment in this most famous and most important reference work is considerable--tested the readability of their new type before adopting it!

Some additional space, according to editor Justin Kaplan, has been gained by the elimination of "several hundred purely mechanical and nonsubstantive cross-references." For example in the 16th on page 247 is given this quotation from Fredrich von Logau: "Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." A footnote at the bottom of the column refers us to Euripides and George Herbert who wrote something similar. In the 17th that footnote is gone and we have no handy reference to the two earlier instances of von Logau's expression. I think this is a clear loss and not something simply "mechanical and nonsubstantive" as editor Justin Kaplan has it in his Preface to the Seventeenth Edition. (p. viii)

Okay, what about the new authors being quoted and the additional quotations by authors already present in the 16th addition? Do they constitute a significant upgrade?

This is a question difficult to answer partly because only time will tell if the new additions--many of them are so new--will really remain worth remembering. Bill Clinton's rather infamous "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" surely will be around for a while, but film director Cameron Crowe's "Show me the money!" from his film Jerry Maguire (1997) may not seem so memorable or familiar a generation or two down the road. (Or maybe I have that backwards!) A quick way to address the question of whether the new quotations are worthwhile is to look at the last pages of entries just before the Anonymous section. Because Bartlett's presents its quotations chronologically, from the earliest (the first quote is from the Egyptian The Song of the Harper 2650 B.C.) to the latest (Sesame Street's Kermit the Frog's "It ain't easy bein' green") most of the new entries are near the back. By the way, technically speaking, Kermit the Frog's dictum is older than Cameron Crowe's movie. But that is a quibble.

Of course there are additions that are not from new authors. French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, who does not appear in the 16th, appears here in the 17th, noting that his "truly marvellous" proof for his famous Last Theorem, will not fit into "this margin." Fermat was rediscovered by Bartlett's no doubt because in 1994 Andrew Wiles finally proved the theorem--taking considerably more than a margin to do it, by the way.

Some other authors appearing for the first time are Mother Teresa, Richard Feynman, Margaret Atwood, Princes Diana, etc. Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and W. Somerset Maugham are among about two dozen who have had their space extended. Kaplan doesn't mention it, but there are also some deletions from the previous edition. I was particularly disappointed to find that one of the central tenets of the Vedas, from the Chandogya Upanishad, "Thou art that" was eliminated.

Also eliminated (and I think this is to the good) are the Ibid's that sometimes ran all the way down the page in the 16th. Now the title of the work is repeated.

If you don't have this reference, you really should get it or the comparable Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. See my review of that very excellent book for a comparison. Suffice it to say here, if you are an American who prefers a slight emphasis on American authors to an emphasis on English authors, you'll want to get this book.

Bottom line: no serious writer (especially of literature, culture and history) should be without this invaluable and authoritative book. Next to a dictionary it is my most consulted work of reference.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Changes in new edition, December 9, 2002

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Mike (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition) (Hardcover)

It should be noted that some reviews here refer to editions PRIOR to the new 17th edition of Bartlett's. For example, Ronald Reagan's Berlin speech "...tear down this wall..." is included in this latest edition along with other updates and revisions.

I would agree with others that it is probably worthwhile to hold onto earlier editions of timepieces/repositories of additional quotes that, with the march of time, get squeezed out of current and future edtions. Every home should have at least one of these in it though.

Nice to see the positive influence of the weekly television treasure, SUNDAY MORNING with Charles Osgood. This book was entertainingly featured yesterday (12/8/02) and visiting Amazon[.com] today, I see the book's sales have jumped 28,150%!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars still the best, March 20, 2006

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spiketheartist (Phoenicia, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition) (Hardcover)

Bartlett's is still the best resource for researching quotations, better than anything I found on the net, including a site that was called Bartlett's. The print Bartlett's does an excellent job of cross-referencing, so when I wanted to track the original source of a quotation, only the print Bartlett's solved the problem. That's why I bought this copy for my local library. Computers haven't solved every research problem yet.