Bartleby.com Expands the Largest Language, Style & Composition Site on the Web
The Complete Text of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language Made Freely Available
| New York — April 18, 2000 —Bartleby.com (http://www.bartleby.com), the first name in Internet publishing of reference, verse and classic literature, today announces the expansion of its Language, Style & Composition collection with the exclusive web publication of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, Second Edition; Edward Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech; and Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Reading and Writing. Together with the encyclopedic contemporary reference work The American Heritage® Book of English Usage—as well as other classic texts like Strunk’s The Elements of Style and H. W. Fowler’s The King’s English—Bartleby.com offers the largest library of usage available on the web: accessible 24 hours per day, at no charge. | 1 | | The American Language is an American classic. While “neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely inquirer,” H. L. Mencken, legendary newspaperman and author, wrote this groundbreaking study to bridge British and American English and define the uniqueness of American speech. Mencken’s great work, which he updated for 30 years, continues to serve as a definitive resource in the field of language study. The Bartleby.com edition includes two hyperlinked indexes: by subject and by word and phrase. | 2 |
| On the Art of Reading and Writing are the collected lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a renowned critic, scholar and editor—as well as the anthologist of the Oxford Book of English Verse, which Bartleby.com first published on the web in the summer of 1996. | 3 | | “Bartleby.com’s expanded Language, Style & Composition collection unites the two camps of great thinkers on language,” said Steven van Leeuwen, Publisher and Founder of Bartleby.com: “those who would describe it as it’s actually used—like Mencken, Sapir and the Editors of the American HeritageŽ Dictionary—and those who would proscribe how it should be used, namely, Strunk, Fowler and Quiller-Couch.” | 4 |
The following books, which comprise some 2000 full-text searchable pages, make up the Bartleby.com Language, Style & Composition collection:
- American Heritage® Book of English Usage. 1996.
- http://www.bartleby.com/64/
- Fowler, H. W. 1908. The King’s English, 2nd ed.
- http://www.bartleby.com/116/
- Strunk, William, Jr. 1918. The Elements of Style.
- http://www.bartleby.com/141/
- Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. 1916. On the Art of Writing.
- http://www.bartleby.com/190/
- Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. 1920. On the Art of Reading.
- http://www.bartleby.com/191/
- Mencken, H. L. 1921. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2nd ed.
- http://www.bartleby.com/185/
- Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
- http://www.bartleby.com/186/
| 5 |
| | About Bartleby.com
|
| Headquartered in New York City, Bartleby.com began publishing on the web in 1994. Now a leading innovator in the field of electronic publishing, Bartleby.com has been widely cited as one of the best reference sites on the web, providing web-based access to such world-class works as The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition; Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition; Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations; and The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Additional offerings include Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Strunk’s Elements of Style, six classic poetry anthologies, Emily Post’s Etiquette, Bulfinch’s Mythology, as well as The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes, considered a landmark of English and American letters. | 6 |
| Named after the character of Melville’s classic “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Bartleby.com provides millions of students, educators and the intellectually curious with unparalleled access to classics and reference books online. | 7 |
|
|
|
