March 31, 2004

Emily Morison Beck, 88, Who Edited Bartlett's Quotations, Dies

mily Morison Beck, the self-described literary archaeologist who edited three editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, mining sources from sea chanteys to Shakespeare, died on Sunday at her home in Canton, Mass. She was 88.

The cause was kidney failure, her son Gordon M. Beck said.

Mrs. Beck brought an august intellectual heritage, an elephantine memory and bristling energy to refining, enlarging and, sometimes, subtracting from a reference book that few libraries are without.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th editions, appearing in 1955, 1968 and 1980, Mrs. Beck gradually added feminist voices, the singers James Brown and Bob Dylan and the first words spoken on the moon, while remedying past omissions, like that of Dickens's "Bah! Humbug!" Excerpts from what she called "members of the crappy poetry society," particularly those who favored nature poems, bit the dust. Robert Lowell was given a new and quite large voice in her Bartlett's. She expanded the entries from Shakespeare and the Bible, the staples since John Bartlett, a bookstore employee in Cambridge, Mass., decided to publish the quotations that he had been collecting in a notebook. But Mr. Bartlett might have been startled by a phrase from the Watergate scandal that appeared in the 15th edition, published in 1980: "Expletive deleted," not to mention "E.T., phone home."

Some critics complained that the whole enterprise had become hopelessly arbitrary. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1981, James Atlas compared the 15th edition of Bartlett's to the 10th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone.

"It is strange to find on the stately double-columned pages words to songs I listened to while sitting in the parking lot of an A & W root beer stand on Friday nights in high school," Mr. Atlas wrote.

Others praised Mrs. Beck's boldness, even down to including an Emerson quotation criticizing quotations: "I hate quotations," it reads, "Tell me what you know."

Mrs. Beck's extensive cross-referencing led to many refinements. For example, she traced Kaufman and Hart's "You Can't Take It With You" to the ancient Egyptians, the Bible and Theognis, a Greek poet.

Emily Marshall Morison was born on Oct. 15, 1915, in Boston, one of four children of Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian, and Elizabeth Greene Shaw. Newsweek noted in 1990 that she gave as much space to quotations from her father as to those from Herodotus and Thucydides.

Nicknamed Wendy after the character in Peter Pan, she was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, England, the Concord Academy in Massachusetts and Radcliffe. She worked as an editor for Harper & Brothers and Alfred A. Knopf, and in 1946 married Brooks Beck, one of the first lawyers to represent authors in their negotiations with publishers. When he joined a law firm in Boston, she got a job with Atlantic Monthly Press, editing books.

In 1952 she was given a leave by Atlantic Monthly to help edit the centennial edition of Bartlett's, which was published by Little, Brown in 1955. In the preface she was cited for her "highly competent and critical service" but not singled out as the book's editor. During the preparation of that book, she wrote memo after memo, some of which made the case for keeping some of Shakespeare's most famous passages. She thus became the obvious choice to edit the next edition of the book, the 14th, which was published in 1968.

Her pursuit of the origins of quotations was dogged and often ingenious. In stalking a Henry James phrase she wanted to include in the 15th edition, she considered skimming his entire works, but chanced upon a magazine article about Truman Capote that attributed the lines to "The Middle Years," an autobiography of James.

She read the entire book and could not find the lines. Then she noticed a little editor's note at the very end, saying James had taken the title from his short story of the same name. She got a complete collection of James's stories and found the quotation on the next to last page.

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have," it read. "Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Mr. Beck died in 1969. Mrs. Beck is survived by her sister, Catharine Cooper, of Islington, England; her sons Cameron, of Canton, and Gordon, of Larchmont, N.Y.; her daughter, Emily M. Beck, of Larchmont; and three grandchildren.

Her helpers on Bartlett's ranged far beyond the academic experts hired by Little, Brown. The organist at her church told her that the correct title of Thomas Grey's poem was "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," not "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," as every edition since John Bartlett had claimed.

Mrs. Beck corrected the error in the 14th.