Q & A: Fred Shapiro
By Mirela Roncevic -- Library Journal, 5/1/2007
The recently published Yale Book of Quotations (LJ 10/15/06) is a compendium of 12,000 quotations drawn from a variety of fields, including literature, pop culture, and social sciences. Compiled by Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and researcher at the Yale Law School, the hefty volume features a user-friendly format that makes it a natural fit for both reference and circulating collections. But perhaps what makes it stand out even more is Shapiro's insatiable appetite for the subject. And after several email exchanges with the busy librarian, it also becomes obvious that producing a reference tome is as much of a personal investment as writing any other type of book.
Where does the fascination with quotations come from?
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 path-breaking general quotation dictionary.
What gives your book the necessary edge in an age when much of this information is available for free online?
The Yale Book of Quotations 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.
What kind of resources did you rely on during the research?
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.
What is your take on the future of print resources in general? Do you see the need to digitize this 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 "spin-off" quotation volumes.
Twelve thousand is a mighty number. Still, you must have favorites. Can you share a couple of quotes that struck a chord?
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).
