Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, often simply called Bartlett's, is an American reference work that is the longest-lived and most widely distributed collection of quotations. The book was first issued in 1855 and is currently in its nineteenth edition, published in 2022. The book arranges its entries by author, rather than by subject, as many other quotation collections, and enters the authors chronologically by date of birth rather than alphabetically. Within years, authors are arranged alphabetically and quotations are arranged chronologically within each author's entry, followed by "attributed" remarks whose source in the author's writings has not been confirmed. The book contains a thorough keyword index and details the source of each quotation. History John Bartlett, who ran the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was frequently asked for information on quotations and he began a commonplace book of them for reference. Bartlett is generally supposed to have drawn the quotations in his book from his own extensive reading and prodigious memory and a commonplace book he kept. But he acknowledged in the 1855 preface that "this Collection ... has been considerably enlarged by additions from an English work on a similar plan." That work, Hancher found, was named in some reviews of the time as the Handbook of Familiar Quotations from English Authors written by Isabella Rushton Preston (London, 1853). Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has a somewhat shadowy editorial provenance. In 1855, he privately printed his compilation as A Collection of Familiar Quotations. This first edition contained 258 pages of quotations by 169 authors, chiefly the Bible, William Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Bartlett wrote in the fourth edition that "it is not easy to determine in all cases the degree of familiarity that may belong to phrases and sentences which present themselves for admission; for what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another." The book was a great success, and Bartlett issued three more editions before joining the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown and Company. Bartlett rose to be the senior partner of the firm and supervised nine editions of the work before his death in 1905, the work selling over 300,000 copies. The seventh edition had appeared in 1875, the eighth edition in 1882, and the ninth in 1891. The tenth edition, however, would not appear for more than twenty years. Edited by Nathan Haskell Dole, the tenth edition (1914) also known