Updating John's Sockdolager

The new Bartlett's adds Dylan and shrinks Shakespeare

He was a passionate fisherman and a passionate taxonomist, and so his collected works include Catalogue of Books on Angling, including Ichthyology, Pisciculture, Etc. Once when he caught a seven-pound trout, he sent it to his friend and whist partner James Russell Lowell, and Lowell rewarded him (and the trout) with some forellean verses that began:

Fit for an Abbott of Theleme, The whole Cardinals' College, or The Pope himself to see in dream Before his Lenten vision gleam, He lies there, the sockdolager!

This was John Bartlett, the mild and scholarly proprietor of the University Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., who was asked so often about the origin of some quotation or other that he decided in 1855 to print a small (295 pages) collection that he entitled Familiar Quotations. Out this month from Little, Brown, in which Bartlett eventually became a senior partner, is the 15th edition of his little collection, the first updating in £ twelve years. Now 1,540 pages, with 22,500 quotations, it is a sockdolager, Nearly 3,000 of the quotations are new| to this edition, ranging from the maxims of Ptahhotpe, an Egyptian vizier of the 24th century B.C. ("Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned") to the gnomic counsel of Cartoonist Robert Crumb ("Keep on truckin' "). And in the array of such selections lies a whole history of Americans' changing views of the world.

Bartlett's own view was that a familiar quotation should be familiar. "The object of this work," said he, "is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for ... 'household words.' " The New England household of 1855 was devoutly high-minded. About one-third of Bartlett's quotations came from Shakespeare and the Bible, the rest mostly from worthy English poets. Among the unincluded: Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau.

Bartlett edited eight revised editions, slowly admitting novelties like Ralph Waldo Emerson. At his retirement, he left a literary monument that remained un touched for almost a quarter-century. The year 1914 echoed to the guns of August, and the tenth edition of Bartlett's vibrated with new quotations from foreigners: Lewis Carroll, Nietzsche, Shaw, George Eliot (also, belatedly, Thoreau's Walden, but still no Hawthorne or Melville). The '20s and '30s brought yet another revolution in literary sensibilities, and new Editor Christopher Morley decided in 1937 that the best rule for choosing a quotation was simply his own taste. "We have tried to make literary power the criterion rather than width and vulgarity of fame," he wrote. Morley's view of literary power brought the Bartlett's debuts of Dostoevsky, Blake, Conrad and T.S. Eliot, along with four columns of quotes from Morley's own forgettable works. World War II, in turn, made literary power yield to political power. Enter Churchill, Hitler, Douglas MacArthur and the Charter of the United Nations.