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. 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.
