The Great Books Of The Western World
The Great Books (second edition) Wikipedia
No discussion of great books would be complete without including the Encyclopedia Brittanica's epic curated collection of The Great Books of the Western World (TGBOTWW). You just had to see them, ranked up on a bookshelf in their state of the art bindings to get a sense that they were a conscious distillation of human knowledge throughout history. It was a product of it's time and it has it's flaws but there can be no doubting that, in conjunction with the two volume Syntopicon, it represents an astonishing resource for the study of the human condition.
The Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set.
The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.
A second edition was published in 1990 in 60 volumes. Some translations were updated, some works were removed, and there were significant additions from the 20th century.
Wikipedia: Great Books of the Western World
If you were rich and wished to flaunt your education, there was no better icon than this bookcase of handsome books! I went through a phase where I lusted after a set of these books so badly I could taste it! Coming from a working class background, they represented to me a secret path to the further education that money and birth had denied me. There was even a ten year reading plan in Vol 1 (p112-131, see more HERE) that was meant to guide you through these 'great books'.
Sanity prevaled. We were a young couple wanting to start a family and the cost of a set of books didn't factor in easily with our practical needs. Life intervened - I'm sure you have similar pressures - and along the way I started to question whether these books really did have relevance in the modern world as the collection became a quarter of a century old.
Thirty-something years later I find myself revisiting them. I am retired now but whilst I now have the spare time to read widely, that doesn't mean I can invest ten years in a reading program nor, for that matter, does it mean I have the spare cash to buy the collection or even the shelf space to store it! Fortunately in this digital age knowledge has become free or at least affordable and can be shrunk to the size of the digital memory that records it.
What I intend to do with this project is to record a comprehensive catalogue of the books in this collection then, in varying degrees of difficulty, to...
- Link to any free copies of the originals that are online
- Link to any other editions or translations of the same book with critiques of each
- Link to analyses of the books
...and ultimately to write up my own thoughts about the book! No, I can't see myself reading any of the books in any great detail but the internet gives us access to scholars who have, who can help me place them into context and distil their effect even more.
NEXT...
A Catalogue of The Great Books of the Western World
The Great Books of the Western World reading plan