I’m generally pretty skeptical that collaborative filtering really works, but damned if Amazon didn’t email me today, under the subject line “Book recommendations for Tim Noah,” an offer I simply couldn’t turn down. For a penny under two bucks I could purchase the sum of all human knowledge. Such a deal!
Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to call my purchase “the sum of all human knowledge,” but that’s more or less how the thing was marketed when it first appeared in 1910. I am speaking of the Harvard Classics, a handsome set of distinctively red small volumes that’s often described as “Dr. Eliot’s five-foot shelf.” Dr. Eliot was Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard from 1869 to 1910. Eliot is often described as Harvard’s greatest president—the man who made Harvard into a great research university. Eliot liked to say that any schmuck could acquire a university education if he spent 15 minutes a day reading a set of books that would take up no more than five feet on a bookshelf. When Eliot retired, the publisher P.F. Collier and Son called his bluff and invited him to name the volumes that would sit on this shelf, and the Harvard Classics were born.
I’ve always fancied owning a set, but under normal circumstances they aren’t cheap—prices usually start at around $400—and besides, I don’t have five feet of bookshelf to spare. Amazon solved both problems by offering the Harvard Classics in a single Kindle edition. Money’s been a little tight lately, but who doesn’t have two bucks to purchase the western canon?
The first thing to be said about Dr. Eliot’s five-foot shelf is that it took me two tries to download it, as a single e-book, on my iPad.
The second thing is that Kindle says it would take me 20 hours and 37 minutes to get through its contents. That is sheer flattery. Nobody could read these 71 books that fast, and I happen to be a slow reader. Even if I were to skip the books I’ve read before I’d be looking at a multi-year commitment.
The Harvard Classics e-book includes, in addition to Dr. Eliot’s five-foot shelf, another set he compiled called “The Shelf of Fiction,” apparently to address the complaint that he’d skipped over all of 19th century fiction (much of which he probably thought of, in 1910, as contemporary fiction.)
So what have we got?
The first volume consists of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (already read that), Fruits of Solitude by William Penn (news to me Pennsylvania’s founder wrote anything at all), and The Journal, by John Woolman. Who is John Woolman? I’m not even out of volume one and I’m Googling to find out that Woolman was a pious Quaker and opponent of slavery whose Journal was much admired by John Stuart Mill.
Volume 2 is Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. So we aren’t proceeding chronologically.
Volume 3 is John Milton’s prose, plus Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne. Volume 4 is Milton’s poetry. Volume 5 is Robert Burns—a whole book of Robert Burns! Whose dialect-rich poetry has always given me a migraine. Every New Year’s Eve I have to look up what “Auld Lang Syne” even means. (“The good old days.” I’ll have forgotten again by the end of this month.) Then Augustine; then we jump back to the ancients—nine Greek dramas, Cicero and Pliny; and then fast-forward to the Enlightenment for The Wealth of Nations.
I have a confession to make. I’ve never read The Wealth of Nations. I know its contents only second-hand. This will surely be used against me.
If the good news about Dr. Eliot’s five-foot shelf on Kindle is that it doesn’t require five feet of shelving, the bad news is that it tends to freeze up on you. There’s a volume called Bunyan and Walton. I know about Bunyan—he’s Mr. Slough of Despond and Mr. Vanity Fair. I have no idea who Walton is, and every time I tap his name to find out I crash the e-book. I’ve read neither Bunyan nor Walton.
(Update, Dec. 3: “Walton” turned out to be Izaak Walton, represented not by The Compleat Angler but by biographies of the metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert.)
There’s a volume called “Modern English Drama” that includes Dryden, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, who these days are read only by dedicated students of Restoration literature, of whom I am not one. Shakespeare inhabits one of two volumes of Elizabethan drama, and I wouldn’t call the entries anywhere near sufficient (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest). Perhaps Dr. Eliot assumes you already own a set of Shakespeare.
If my daughter Alice were here she’d say, “Wow, Dad, that’s some kind of sausage fest. No wonder it cost only two bucks!” I find no women at all in the five-foot shelf, unless there are some hiding in the anthologies. In the Shelf of Fiction, I find three: Jane Austin, George Eliot, and George Sand. (Is it mere coincidence that two of the three women had pseudonyms that made them sound like men?) Interestingly, many of the books on Charles Eliot’s list of notable fiction are about women: Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, The Mill on the Floss, The Portrait of A Lady, Anna Karenina. Persons of color don’t make much of an appearance, though there is A Thousand and One Nights.
Despite all these shortcomings, I am glad to possess the sum of human knowledge, circa 1910, at the low, low cost of $2. That price point would have translated into less than a dime in Eliot’s day. Perhaps that would delight him—the republic of letters has arrived in America—every man (and woman) a scholar! Or perhaps it would depress him—nobody has any use for these dusty volumes anymore. Neither is actually true, but as a point of information I discovered after I made my purchase that you can download the Harvard Classics free of charge. Which prices it alongside Backbencher. So now my Substack newsletter has to compete with White Males’ Greatest Hits.
But enough dawdling. I must decide how many of these pixels I intend to read. Ars longa vita brevis.
Corrections. An earlier version of this column stated there were two rather than three women represented in the Harvard Classics; I missed George Sand, who was tucked quietly into a volume of French lit with Balzac, DeMusset, Daudet, and DeMaupassant.
Also, an earlier version of this column joked, incorrectly, that it was MGM’s Leo the Lion who first said Ars longa vita brevis. The joke should have been that Leo first said Ars Gratia Artis, because that’s what it actually says on MGM’s logo. Leo very likely was the first to say Ars Gratia Artis, because the phrase is bungled Latin. The MGM motto was intended to dress up the phrase, “Art for art’s sake” with some fancy larnin’. But these particular Latin words arranged in that particular order don’t translate into anything coherent, so Leo should have done his roaring in English.
In good Latin or bad, “Art for art’s sake” is a sentiment that has no salience to this column, so Leo has been excised. Thanks to my friends Joel Bellman and Wilson Mudge for flagging this mistake, and providing me an occasion to entertain you with MGM’s mistake.
Addendum. If you’d like to read a much more learned consideration of Dr. Eliot’s choices, I recommend this essay by the excellent Adam Kirsch.