Bartlett's

Coming home from Manhattan Friday night I found the 10th edition of Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, published in 1919, propped against a fence on 10th Avenue. A small ornament on the title page reveals that the Bartlett's collections have been published continually since 1863 by Little, Brown and Company. In this volume the pages are thin, cream bleeding to an inch of brown around the edges, and they break very easily. It was inscribed to someone named Knowles on Oct. 29, 1935. Hard times!

I opened it to Francis Bacon "Come home to men's business and bosoms." I wonder how many of the quotes in this edition have been pruned out to make room for later ones because they don't come home to the modern, um, bosom. I'm sure a lot had to go to make way for the 20th Century. Who got dropped for a modern, I wonder? Thomas Fuller? "Often the cockloft is empty in those whom Nature hath built many stories high" –Andronicus. Maybe Donald Grant Mitchell's been given the boot. "Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depaves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose– easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters. –Reveries of a Bachelor. Well, I don't know what to make of that, I thought coquetry and flirtation were the same thing. Someone named Thomas Middleton, who I take it gave us the phrase "spick and span" urged us to "Beat all your feathers as flat down as pancakes." Something tells me he wasn't a fan of peacocks.

I wonder if the Bacon quote is in the contemporary editions, I can't see people using the fusty word bosom very much these days without some irony, although I'd love to change all that if it were in my power. I've been reading up on the word, yes, I know it means chest, but it also means surface. I recently watched a pair of swans and mallards descending on a brackish inlet, connecting feathery breast to watery bosom with a combination of drama and elegance that might be the envy of many a pilot and airline passenger. And now my bosom bloggers and non-bloggers, I'm off to make some lentil soup, grateful that John Barlett took up the pen for people like me with capricious memories and limited exposure.