Familiar Quotations

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” A few lines later, the old words turn ominous: “There is death in the pot.”

John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations began in 1855, growing from a private notebook into a gathering place for words that outlast their first telling. Its opening draws on Genesis, the Psalms, Proverbs, the Common Prayer, and the New Testament: a treasury of rebuke, comfort, warning, and wonder. Here, a phrase may be a prayer, a proverb, or a blade; familiar words reveal how much meaning can gather in a few lines. Which echoes will you recognize—and which will make you hear an old saying anew?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.