In the nineteenth-century, John Bartlett was famous in Cambridge Massachusetts for his mental inventory of historically important quotations. In 1855 he published A Collection of Familiar Quotations. Now in its eighteenth edition, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is the most well known and longest-running collection of its kind.

In 1980, revised and enlarged, the fifteenth edition signaled a turn for the worse. ““Donning the intellectual bell-bottoms and platform shoes of its era, Bartlett’s began spouting third-rate […] quotes.”^{[attribution needed]}” – Wikipedia. It suffered aesthetically too. Dwiggins’s lively Electra was ditched for an eye-rolling transitional-neoclassical mix. The cover typography resembles a costume mustache. It’s a real and really low point. For excellence and elegance, one should look no further than Bartlett’s fourteenth.

Culled from the litter of Critter’s poor and scattered brain, Inferior Quotations is a collection of thematically sequenced imaginations. In the template of the fourteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a delusional fantasy unravels as the reader proceeds. Coherence is a convincing illusion. Attribution is deftly deflected in a matter-of-fact and metacredible way. The book is a personified oddity. It has its ups and downs, but all is well in the end.