John Bartlett (publisher)

His mother was a direct descendant of Anthony and Elizabeth Thacher, who were the sole survivors of a shipwreck on August 14, 1635, in which 21 passengers, including their four children, drowned.

In 1855, he privately printed the first edition of his Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which was 258 pages long and included notable historical and current quotes from 169 people.

One-third of the book was quotations from the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and most of the balance were quotes from the great English poets.

He served on the South Atlantic station, and returned to Boston in 1863, joining Little, Brown and Company, one of the nation's leading book publishers.

[1] The concordance, which Bartlett estimated consumed 16,000 hours of his time, was compiled with his wife Hannah, the daughter of Sidney Willard, a professor of Hebrew at Harvard University, and the granddaughter of Joseph Willard, president of Harvard.