BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, Justin Kaplan, general editor, Little, Brown & Co., 1,405 pages, $40.

“Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth,” quipped modern-day wit Peter Ustinov. This trenchant contemporary observation is one of the numerous inclusions in the updated 16th edition of America’s most celebrated literary reference book, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

The moving spirit behind the bold revision was Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Justin Kaplan who writes in the preface, “A quotation book is both intellectual history and cultural montage, a key to past and present taste, memory, and enthusiasms as they themselves change …”

Of the 20,000 quotations clapped between royal blue and gold covers, 340 are first-time entries.

Kaplan disputes the belief that Bartlett’s is an anachronism in the pressure cooker of electronic and visual media. Our language draws on quotations, he insists. “We cherish and like to repeat, simply for the reassurance they give, proverbs, nursery rhymes, song lyrics, and the like that have so much talismanic force they function on a nearly pre-intellectual level.”

The first edition of Bartlett’s, launched in 1855, was the brainchild of John Bartlett. Born in Massachusetts in 1820, he was apprenticed at 16 to a bookbinder but found himself much more interested in the contents of books than in their bindings. He became a clerk in a Cambridge bookshop and subsequently owner of the shop. He kept careful record of favorite phrases and passages — “household words,” he called them — and committed many of them to memory. This did not escape the attention of the professors and students at Harvard who frequented his bookshop. It was their habit whenever anyone came to the shop seeking the source of a literary quotation to advise the person, “Ask John Bartlett.”

At age 35, Bartlett compiled his notes into a small volume titled “Familiar Quotations,” and paid to have 1,000 copies printed. At the time of Bartlett’s death in 1905, his reference book had undergone nine revisions.

The general index is 700 pages long; index of authors takes up 42 pages; and the number of authors quoted is 2,550. Quotations, arranged chronologically, stretch from the ancient Egyptian “Song of the Harper” (c. 2650-2600 B.C.) to the 1969 song “It’s not that easy bein’ green” from the song sung by Kermit the Frog.

Bartlett’s rings every bell of human emotion in its belfry of quotations — from the bitter gall of Shakespeare’s “King Richard II” to the sudden laughter elicited by the line in Mordecai Richler’s “The Incomparable Atuk” (1963): “I’m world-famous,” Dr. Parks said, “all over Canada.”

Kaplan describes the feat of updating and revising this famous omnium-gatherum as an irresistible project. It is a tour de force, one that gives promise of fresh honors for this gifted writer.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly Books in Review feature. She also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”