John Bartlett--publisher, editor, and lexicographer--remains famous for the volume of quotations that still bears his name. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a book he first published himself in 1855, went through nine editions in his lifetime. Bartlett also produced a concordance to William Shakespeare's works that was only supplanted by a computer-generated concordance of the 1974 Riverside edition.

John Bartlett was born on 14 June 1820 to William and Susan (Thatcher) Bartlett in Plymouth, Massachusetts; he counted among his ancestors two who came to Plymouth on the Mayflower. Educated in public schools in Plymouth, he started his career in Cambridge, where he found employment as a bookbinder in the Harvard College Bookstore at the age of sixteen. Soon he became a clerk, and by 1849, before he was thirty years old, he owned the store. He was young when he arrived in Cambridge. He lacked the education of his powerful, erudite customers. He compensated by...