1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bartlett, John

BARTLETT, JOHN (1820–1905), American publisher and compiler, was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the 14th of June 1820. He became a bookseller and publisher in Cambridge, Mass., and from 1865 to 1889, when he retired, was a member of the bookselling and publishing firm of Little, Brown & Co., in Boston. In 1855 he published the first edition of his Familiar Quotations, subsequently greatly expanded and long the best-known collection of the sort, and in 1894 (although it had been copyrighted five years before), after many years’ labour, he published his New and Complete Concordance or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases and Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare; with a Supplementary Concordance to the Poems—surpassing any of its predecessors in the number and fulness of its citations from the poet’s writings. In all of his work he was greatly assisted by his wife, a daughter of Sidney Willard (1780–1856), professor of Hebrew at Harvard from 1807 to 1831. Bartlett died at Cambridge, Mass., on the 3rd of December 1905.