The Harvard Classics

The Encyclopedia Foundation chose the Harvard Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge (or The Harvard Classics) as the most appropriate companion set to the 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

This set was published in 1910, one year before the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published. Historically, the same time.

The stated purpose caught our eye. The compiler, Dr. Charles Eliot, was President of Harvard University, back when it had the highest of standards. That is, folks like Conan O’Brien (funny as he can be) weren’t giving commencement speeches back then, and honorary degrees weren’t being awarded to generously donating dictators.
Dr. Eliot claimed that a person could have the equivalent of a liberal arts degree from Harvard if they would just read 15 minutes a day from a series of books that could fit on a five foot shelf. He later described, and had published, 51 volumes that were representative of Western literary, historical, cultural, scientific, and religious thought.

It was masterful, it was a wild success, and it’s popularity is undiminished 101 years later! (Sets may be found on ebay anywhere from $100 to $300.)

There have been some that have tried to imitate this. Or “update” it. “Great Books of the Western World” is a notable example. However, the problems with other sets were several. Often times, bias would be present, political correctness would creep in, ideological agendas would overwhelm…it kept any reasonably good set from being created.

Another problem was that the original set has a certain panache. It was published before World War One, same time as the Britannica set so famous, and represented – as did the Britannica – the end of an era. After the “Great War”, the world lost a lot of its optimism.

From a historical standpoint, these two sets (Harvard and Britannica) are THE sets for being the recording of all knowledge and culture up until the turn of the 20th century. Those two sets “are” that era.

The Britannica has the how to. But the Harvard Classics has the why. How to live. And why we live. Truth. And beauty.

The Harvard Classics have 51 volumes of about 500 pages each. The 13th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes of about 1,000 pages each. So in under 60,000 pages, in under 100 books, one could be educated completely by early 20th century standards. And more than “educated completely”, the most rudimentary grasp of those would render you a savant!