The Harvard Classics (the Five-Foot Shelf) 1909 to 1910

Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard for forty years, often said that a shelf five feet long would hold enough books to give anyone a liberal education with fifteen minutes' reading a day. In 1909 P. F. Collier and Son held him to it: the Harvard Classics, fifty volumes edited by Eliot with William Allan Neilson, sold by subscription in their hundreds of thousands, with a fifty-first volume of lectures and a reading guide that set out a page a day for a year. The selection runs from Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Augustine through Bacon, Milton and Bunyan to Darwin, Mill and the scientific papers of Pasteur and Lister, with drama, poetry, voyages and sacred writings in between.

There are two collecting stories here. The first is the set itself: complete Harvard Classics in the original Collier bindings turn up often, are heavy to post and sell for modest sums, while the Registered and De Luxe editions in leather, and sets with the Lectures and the Reading Guide, are the ones worth more. The second is the works inside it. Most are centuries older than Collier's printing and their first editions are rare books by any measure: The Wealth of Nations (Strahan and Cadell, 1776), The Pilgrim's Progress (Nathaniel Ponder, 1678), Leviathan (Andrew Crooke, 1651), The Voyage of the Beagle (in Colburn's 1839 Narrative), On Liberty (J. W. Parker, 1859). The newer American books, Franklin's Autobiography and Two Years Before the Mast (Harper, 1840), are the approachable end.

Each row links to the work's page, where its first edition is identified against two sources where we hold it, and a value band appears once we record sales of that printing.