LJ Talks to...Fred R. Shapiro

By Mirela Roncevic -- Library Journal, 4/10/2007

The recently published Yale Book of Quotations (LJ 10/15/06) is a compendium of 12,000 quotations drawn from a wide variety of fields, including literature, pop culture, social sciences, sciences, folklore, and others. Compiled by Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and researcher at the Yale Law School, the hefty volume has been getting quite a bit of attention in the media—and for good reasons. Its user-friendly format and unique focus on American (rather than global) quotations make it a natural fit for both reference and circulating collections. Perhaps what makes it stand out even more is editor Shapiro’s insatiable appetite for the subject; it took six years to research. After several email exchanges with the busy librarian, it also becomes obvious to LJ's Mirela Roncevic that producing a reference tome is as much of a personal investment as writing any other type of book.

When I was about 10 years old my father brought home a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from the Strand used-book store in New York City. I enjoyed browsing through the book, and this undoubtedly marks the beginnings of my interest in quotations. In college, I edited a popular quotation column in a student newspaper. Later, when I became a law librarian, I realized that there was no up-to-date, accurate legal quotation dictionary, and I compiled the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. In the course of compiling it, I developed innovative methods of quotation research, and it was a natural leap to using these methods to create a pathbreaking general quotation dictionary.

I used extremely powerful electronic tools to search vast numbers of historical texts for early usages of quotations, proverbs, and phrases. Among the more useful tools were: JSTOR; ProQuest Historical Newspapers and American Periodical Series; Times Digital Archive; LexisNexis; Newspaperarchive.com; Questia; Eighteenth Century Collections Online; and Literature Online. I also made extensive use of the Stumpers network of reference librarians and researchers (now known as Project Wombat). I submitted many inquiries to the Stumpers list, eliciting help with finding difficult quotation origins and verifying specific citations, and received extraordinary cooperation and sleuthing from the participants. Finally, traditional methods of library research, utilizing the resources of the Yale University Library, one of the world’s great collections, as well as interlibrary borrowing from many other institutions, were pursued to verify quotations and find the origins of sayings.

is a revolutionary dictionary in two respects. This is the first major quotation book to emphasize modern and American materials and to fully represent such areas as popular culture, children’s literature, sports, computers, politics, law, and the social sciences (while still including the best-known quotations from older literary and historical sources). Hundreds of very famous and popular quotations omitted from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are included here. This is also the first quotation book of any sort to use state-of-the-art research methods to ensure that all famous quotations are captured and to trace the sources of quotations to their true origins or earliest discoverable usages. For a large percentage of the most famous quotations, evidence is provided earlier than that given by Bartlett’s and Oxford, often disproving the standard accounts of origins.

and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are both also organized by author. That approach is characteristic of compilations emphasizing literature and history and more substantial, less ephemeral quotations. I think that the other approach, that of thematic arrangement, is more arbitrary, and that the book’s index can serve as a kind of topical entree into the book.

Response to The Yale Book of Quotations, both by book buyers and by reviewers and the media, has been so extraordinary that it seems to provide a kind of proof that there is still a place for print resources, particularly for a book that is attractive for browsing as well as for looking up specific quotations. No one can predict how well print will hold up in the long term, but I believe that in the decades to come my book will continue to be popular among libraries and readers in a print format. I am discussing with Yale University Press the options for eventual electronic databases encompassing this book and also specialized "spinoff" quotation volumes.

Serious: "The majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." (Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge, 1894). Frivolous: "I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." (Tom Waits, quoted in Creem Magazine, 1978).