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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
