Quotations editor Beck dies at 88

Emily Morison Beck, who edited three editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, adding comments by an astronaut, a prizefighter and several folk singers to a collection more often associated with poets, philosophers and world-class statesmen, died March 28.

She suffered kidney failure and died at home in Canton, Mass., according to her son, Cameron Beck. She was 88.

Beck, who was the daughter of Samuel Eliot Morison, a naval historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, also edited a selection of her father’s writings, “Sailor Historian,” which was his last book before he died in 1976.

“An interest in writers and writing both fiction and nonfiction led me from college into trade publishing and various editing projects,” Beck said later in life. “The most challenging one was editing Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.”

Beck was one of a group of editors who worked on the book’s 13th edition (1955) and was the editor of the 14th (1968) and 15th (1980) editions. The work was “literary archeology,” she said. She considered Bartlett’s a record of human efforts to express basic human truths.

The quotations found in Bartlett’s “reveal to us that people from ancient times, from the first written utterances, can speak to us today in ways that inspire, inform, comfort, entertain,” Beck wrote in the preface to the 15th edition.

Over the years, Beck expanded the number of quotations by women, including contemporary essayist Joan Didion (“Writers are always selling somebody out”) and the late poet Sylvia Plath (“Dying is an art, like everything else”). Beck also pruned outdated entries by what she referred to as “members of the crappy poetry society,” particularly nature poets.

Taking her cue from John Bartlett, who published the first Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations in 1855 to record “numerous quotations that have become household words,” Beck added television anchorman Walter Cronkite’s line, “And that’s the way it is,” from the close of his news broadcasts.