p. 15, Bartlett used the American Pilot to learn about Herald Island.
p. 37: His Grandmother Leamon, in particular had a lot to do with shaping his tastes. From her he picked up a lifelong love of books, and even of poetry….
p. 169, during WWII: …he collected poetry, as he had been doing most of his life. When a piece of writing, prose or verse, in a magazine or newspaper pleased him, he clipped it and pasted it in his log, then wrote around it in such cramped longhand that his entries became illegible….
He also went back to reading the classics. He discovered a particular love for Wordsworth, reading and rereading such long narratives as The Prelude and The Excursion and commenting on their qualities.
p. 170, Bartlett had heard Rachmaninoff play and seen Noel Coward’s movie: Every moment he could spare from other activities, he buried himself in a book. He read and reread the accounts of all the great arctic explorations until he could quote them from memory almost verbatim. But he read everything else, too—the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, for example. (He pronounced them ‘marvellous.’) His room in New York was filled with a jumble of books and arctic souvenirs, heads and skins and narwhal tusks and Inuit handicrafts. His bunk on the Morrissey was piled so high with books and magazines that he slept, always, on the floor.