Bartleby.com Unveils Reference Library

Posted on March 21, 2000

Bartleby.com, has expanded its online reference library, offering free, searchable access to reference works. The site provides web-based access to reference works such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, published by Columbia University Press and 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, published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Prior to these new additions the website already included other reference works including Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Strunk's Elements of Style, Emily Post's Etiquette and the Cambridge History of English & American Literature. Bartleby.com also unveiled a complete website redesign. Visitors to Bartleby.com can access informative summaries of each book, as well as biographies with pictures of authors featured in the online library. Also new is the ``Bartleby Weekly'' feature, providing a weekly update of new content additions, and the Bartleby Bookstore.

``Bartleby.com makes publishing history today,'' said Steven van Leeuwen, publisher and founder of Bartleby.com. ``As the only publisher combining the best of both contemporary and classic reference works, we have created the most comprehensive public reference library ever published on the web-a collection that will grow massively in the coming months.''

Headquartered in New York City, Bartleby.com began publishing on the web in 1994. Named after the humble character of Melville's classic Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bartleby.com provides access to classics and reference books online. Bartleby.com began as a personal research experiment in 1993 and within one year published its first classic book on the web, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Since then, Bartleby.com has continued to add new classical literature and reference works.