When Americans say a phrase is “in Bartlett’s,” they mean it has achieved a kind of canonical status — that it belongs to the shared treasury of English-language quotation. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, first published in 1855, is the longest-running quotation anthology in English. Understanding its history is understanding how quotation culture developed in America.
John Bartlett and the First Edition
John Bartlett (1820–1905) began collecting quotations as a young man working at the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where students and faculty would come to him to trace a half-remembered phrase or locate a passage. He was known as someone who “always knows,” and he kept a notebook of passages that customers frequently requested. In 1855 he self-published the first edition of Familiar Quotations — 258 pages, mostly drawn from Shakespeare, the Bible, and eighteenth-century English poetry.
The book sold well enough that he revised and expanded it repeatedly over the following decades. By the ninth edition (1891), it ran to more than a thousand pages. Bartlett remained its editor until his death; the book has been updated continuously since, currently in its eighteenth edition (2012).
What Bartlett Included and What He Left Out
The original editions were heavily weighted toward English and classical sources. American authors and especially American vernacular and oral traditions were underrepresented. Walt Whitman, for instance, appeared only in later editions despite his enormous influence on American poetry. Critics have noted that the anthology’s canon-forming influence tended to reinforce existing literary hierarchies: writers who were already celebrated got more entries; writers on the margins of respectability got fewer or none.
The Competition
Bartlett’s dominance did not go unchallenged. H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations (1942) was deliberately broader in scope, drawing on proverbs, folk sayings, and non-English sources alongside canonical literary texts. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (first published in 1941) approached the task more systematically, prioritizing documented sources over familiarity. Both works shaped the quotation culture of their eras in ways that complemented and competed with Bartlett’s.
The Book as a Cultural Mirror
Comparing editions of Bartlett’s across 170 years reveals how the literary canon has shifted: which writers have entered, which have been reduced, which have disappeared. The additions to the twentieth-century editions — including Hughes, Morrison, O’Connor, Baldwin — reflect the broadening of what American culture recognizes as quotable. The book is, in this sense, a historical document about changing tastes as much as a reference work about fixed truths.