American publisher and editor John Bartlett compiled Familiar Quotations in 1855 and a Shakespearean concordance in 1894.

From fathers of the Mayflower, the ship of the Pilgrims, he descended. A very bright boy, he read at three years of age in 1823 and finished the entire Bible before nine years of age in 1829. He finished school in 1836 and went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and work for the university bookstore that served Harvard.
He owned the store before 1849. Stumped persons in the community knew to "ask John Bartlett," for trivia.

He began keeping a commonplace book to answer queries and in 1855 privately printed it first. From 169 authors, those 258 pages contained entries. From the Bible and from the works of the bard came one-third of the book; from the great English poets came lines in most of the balance.