Preface to "Bartlett"

Boston: Little Brown and Company. Very Good with no dust jacket. 1937. 1st Separate Edition. Hardcover. Wear to all corners, spine ends rubbed, free endpapers and heads of leaves very faintly toned. Lacks the glassine wrapper, as most do.; Morley was Editor-in-Chief of the 1937 11th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and wrote this oh-so-typically-Morley Preface. In editing with collaborator Louella D. Everett, they focused not only on inclusion, but the exclusion of quotations that had outlived their usefulness. Of "Bartlett's" he said " This is in no sense a collection of personal choices. It is foremost a salvage of those words which users of the English tongue have shown evidence not willingly to let die." "Ancient footnotes that have come downstream through former editions have often been dropped when they seemed pointless: one remembers the man (I forget who) described by Dr. Johnson as having ‘a rage for saying something when there was nothing to be said.’" In the matter of new inclusions this edition is not so stringent: we have tried to make literary power the criterion rather than width and vulgarity of fame." Little Brown and Company promoted the BFQ 11th edition with full text of the Preface published in Atlantic Monthly, August, 1937. This offprint or 1st separate edition of Preface to "Bartlett," likely a promotion or keepsake, was issued two months after that in an initial printing of 1,800 copies. Lyle/Brown 31. Eight monochrome photographs. Bound in black and red patterned paper over boards, red spine, title to paper label on front cover. Printed on laid, cream paper. Clean and conservatively Very Good condition. Morley collectors will feel 'at home' reading this, his elegant prose.; B&W Photographs; 12mo 7" - 7½" tall; [2], 3-29, [3 blanks] pages .