JOHN BARTLETT AS A sixteen-year old lad started to work in the Harvard College bookstore, where he came to know the stock--inside and out--so well that whenever there was any question about anything, people would just say "Ask John Bartlett." He kept a notebook of some of the things that people asked him, and in 1855, when he was 35, and by then owned the bookstore, he published part of the contents of his notebook, a "small thin volume," called Familiar Quotations. Its object was to show "to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become 'household words.'" By the time it was in its fourth edition, both the book and Bartlett himself moved to Little, Brown Publishers. In his lifetime, his book went through five more editions, each one larger than the previous one. Now, if you want to know what Elbert Hubbard, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, had to say about loyalty to your employer, Bartlett will tell you: "If you work for a man, in heaven's name, work for him! If he pays you wages that supply you bread and butter, work for him--speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents."
