The Yale Book of Quotations [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

A good quotations collection will give the definitive wording of quotations, provide information as to the quotations' sources and eliminate spurious sources, and be interesting enough to read or browse in its own right, even when no particular quotation is sought. The Yale Book of Quotations does all of these things, and it does them better than its nearest competitors (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). The Yale Book of Quotations is the first new comprehensive collection in many years, and it has benefited from a rethinking of the quotations selected, the use of modern databases to track quotations back to their origins, and comparison with those original sources to assure accuracy.

The immediately noticeable difference is a selection that is more likely to appeal to a modern American audience. Bartlett's has pages of quotations from Dryden, most of which inspire neither recollection nor pleasant surprise. Yale has 12 quotations from Dryden, which is enough to include all the genuinely familiar Dryden quotations. On the other hand, Yale has 23 quotations from George W. Bush, many uttered after Bartlett's was last updated. Yale includes extensive selections of proverbs and sayings, political slogans, television catchphrases, and other familiar lines. In general, although Yale's use of literary quotations is comprehensive (there are, for example, 455 quotations from Shakespeare), the quotation selection tends to be relatively less literary and more inclined toward quotations of contemporary interest, particularly to Americans. It may be for this reason that, frankly, Yale is just a lot more fun to browse.

Less dramatic, but perhaps ultimately a better indicator of usefulness, is the impressive level of research that went into compiling the Yale Book. Have you ever wondered who said "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"? Yale cites to several authors who used versions of this line, the earliest of which ("such a thing as a 'free' lunch never existed") was in the Reno Evening Gazette on January 22, 1942. It is unlikely that such an obscure source could have been located without modern databases. It was indeed Horace Greeley who said "Go West, young man"; Yale spends a quarter of a page discussing this quotation, which it notes is one of the great examples of the prevalence of misinformation about famous quotations (both Bartlett's and Oxford get it wrong). The Yale Book of Quotations offers a level of scholarship and reliability that is simply not otherwise available.

A copy of this handsome new volume was given to me for my eighty-first birthday, so, at that age having so little time to waste, I immediately set about to test this YBQ against my much older Bartlett's (1968 edition).

YBQ is certainly more fun. Harry S. Truman appears, of course, in both books, but it is the YBQ that quotes Harry's letter to Paul Hume: "I have just read your lousy review [of my daughter's concert] .... You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job..." No, nothing like that in good old Bartlett's.

YBQ has the wit, and is obviously more up-to-date, but I must say that Bartlett's is better organized, and has more scholarship, at least scholarship of the kind that I appreciate.

I was happy to see that both books will give you one of my favorite lines of poetry, usually cited in the original French, from Villon: "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?" ('But where are the snows of yesteryear ?'). Both books have this line, in both French and English, but only Bartlett's will lead you to it if you look for the French 'neiges' in the index. To find the line in YBQ, you need to look in the index for 'snows,' not actually a word used, even in English, by those who love this line.

Speaking of indexes, well, the YBQ's is awful. It is radically shorter than Bartlett's. It will not lead you to a page number but only to the name of the writer-source of the quotation. And these sources are not always easy to find in the body of the YBQ because the page headings are organized in an eccentric way.

But my biggest problem with the YBQ arises from its quirky way of dealing with disputed attributions. Shapiro, the YBQ's editor, is good about signaling when there is a problem. But he feels called upon to come down on one side or another about whether a given quotation is genuine or spurious.

Here are some examples:

Concerning George Washington and that famous hatchet, Shapiro tells us "apocryphal" (p. 804) without bothering to tell us why he thinks so. Lenin's statement about "useful idiots," Shapiro says, "seems to be a myth" (p. 452). On the other hand, he comes down on the side of authenticity in the case of a statement made by the Nazi-era Pastor Niemöller (p. 551). To his credit, he seems neutral in the case of an alleged statement by Adolf Hitler (p. 361).

These questions of attribution are difficult, and absent a great deal of research, are difficult to make. I think that he is almost certainly wrong about Niemöller, but nobody will expect him to be an expert on everything. It would have been much wiser for him to simply state, in most if not all these cases, that there is doubt about authenticity, to give whatever sources are available, and to let it go at that.

YBQ has a total of 1067 pages. Not bad. But my old Bartlett's has 1750 pages, each one of which seems denser than those of YBQ. Much of the difference comes from the fact that Bartlett's has a magnificent, thorough index of quotations, taking up 593 pages. YBQ's index of 212 pages is no by means puny, but it doesn't compare. Fortunately I do have enough space for both of these works, and they now stand side by side, in uneasy companionship, on my long-suffering shelf.

Amazon has it a bit wrong on this page, as Joseph Epstein wrote the foreword and not the book. This excellent work is edited by Fred R. Shapiro, who also wrote, The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. Mr. Shapiro is an associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School library.

Quotes can be elusive buggers with attributions mistakenly attached to numerous celebrity names and quote books have a reputation of not always being accurate or reporting sources (right or wrong). The Yale Book of Quotations seeks to change that by tracing quotes back to their original source. It took a number of years, a lot of digging through databases, paging through old books and newspapers, and contributions from a dedicated bunch of researchers to make this happen.

Fred R. Shapiro's The Yale Book of Quotations is highly accurate and very useful for people trying to find out who was the first to say what, so if you need to spice up that speech with a couple of useful quotes, or just impress your friends with your quote trivia ability, this book is for you.