"The Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge": A Grand 50 Volume Collection of The Harvard Classics
Limited Edition - Collector's Set. A truly unique and fascinating set to showcase in your home library or office. This edition is designed to outlast other printings of The Harvard Classics, and will make an enduring and luxurious addition to your own collection. Leather bound edition.
In 1910, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, then President of Harvard University, assembled an exceptional library of "all the books needed for a real education." This is the complete and full matching set, luxuriously bound in genuine leather. This collection features 1,850 works by over 300 poets, philosophers, scientists, explorers, and many others.
Ideal For the Scholar: A Complete and Matching 50 volume Set!
The Harvard Classics, Easton Press, Norwalk, Ct. 1994. Dr. Charles W. Eliot, "Five Foot Shelf of Books. " Millennium Edition. This a compete set of 50 volumes. Very Fine condition. All original bookplates are unattached and unmarked.
The complete collection. Bound in full genuine leather. Front and back covers gilt-stamped in 22 kt gold with veritas emblem of Harvard University. All edges cased in gilt. Spine lettering gilt, with Eliot Edition noted. Illustrated frontis in each, with protective tissue. Holographic endpapers of genuine silk, with gilt tooling on turn-ins. Red silk bookmarks in each.
Printed on archival quality paper, especially milled for this edition (as stated).
Condition
Very Fine. All 50 volumes in As New condition. The condition is of the highest quality. The set also includes the 50 original unused Easton Press issued bookplates, and the original card. Please scroll down for photos.
Includes all the classic Easton Press qualities:
* Premium Leather
* Silk Moire Endleaves
* Distinctive Cover Design
* Hubbed Spine, Accented in Real 22KT Gold
* Satin Ribbon Page Marker
* Gilded Page Edges
* Long-lasting, High Quality Acid-neutral Paper
* Smyth-sewn Pages for Strength and Durability
* Beautiful Illustrations
This collection includes the following titles:
Volume I. - Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, William Penn
Volume II. - Plato, Epictecus, Marcus Aurelius
Volume III. - Bacon, Milton's Prose, Thomas Browne
Volume IV. - Milton's Complete Poems in English
Volume V. - Emerson. Essays and English Traits
Volume VI. - Burns. Poems and Songs
Volume VII. - Saint Augustine, The Confessions. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Volume VIII. - Nine Greek Dramas
Volume IX. - Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny
Volume X. - Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations
Volume XI. - Darwin. The Origin of Species
Volume XII. - Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Volume XIII. - Virgil's Aeneid
Volume XIV. - Cervantes. Don Quixote, Part I
Volume XV. - Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress. Donne and Herbert. Isaak Walton
Volume XVI. - The Thousand and One Nights
Volume XVII. - Folk-Lore and Fable, Aesop, Grimm, Anderson
Volume XVIII. - Modern English Drama
Volume XIX. - Goethe: Faust, Egmont, etc. Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Volume XX. - Dante. The Divine Comedy
Volume XXI. - Manzoni. I Promessi Sposi
Volume XXII. - Homer. The Odyssey
Volume XXIII. - Dana. Two Years Before the Mast
Volume XXIV. - Burke. On the Sublime; Reflections on the Revolution in France, etc.
Volume XXV. - J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle
Volume XXVI. - Continental Drama
Volume XXVII. - English Essays, Sidney to Macaulay
Volume XXVIII. - English and American Essays
Volume XXIX. - Darwin. Voyage of the Beagle
Volume XXX. - Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newcomb, etc.
Volume XXXI. - Cellini. Autobiography
Volume XXXII. - Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, etc.
Volume XXXIII. - Voyages and Travels
Volume XXXIV. - Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes
Volume XXXV. - Froissart, Malory, Holinshed
Volume XXXVI. - Machiavelli, More, Luther
Volume XXXVII. - Locke, Berkeley, Hume
Volume XXXVIII. - Harvey, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur
Volume XXXIX. - Famous Prefaces
Volume XL. - English Poetry, 1
Volume XLI. - English Poetry, 2
Volume XLII. - English Poetry, 3
Volume XLIII. - American Historical Documents
Volume XLIV. - Sacred Writings, 1
Volume XLV. - Sacred Writings, 2
Volume XLVI. - Elizabethan Drama, 1
Volume XLVII. - Elizabethan Drama, 2
Volume XLVIII. - Pascal. Thoughts and Minor Works
Volume XLIX. - Epic and Saga
Volume L. - Introduction, Reader's guide and Indexes
Photos
 Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.
Eliot's legacy
Under Eliot, Harvard became a national institution, recruiting its students from around the country using standardized entrance examination and hiring distinguished scholars from home and abroad. Eliot was an administrative reformer, reorganizing the university's faculty into schools and departments and replacing recitations with lectures and seminars. During his forty year presidency, the university vastly expanded its facilities, with laboratories, libraries, classrooms, and athletic facilities replacing simple colonial structures. Eliot attracted the support of major donors from among the nation's growing plutocracy, making it the wealthiest private university in the world.
Eliot's leadership not only made Harvard the pace-setter for other American colleges and universities, but a major figure in the reform of secondary school education. Both the elite boarding schools, most of them founded during his presidency, and the public high schools shaped their curricula to meet Harvard's demanding standards. Eliot was a key figure in the creation of standardized admissions examinations, as a founding member of the College Entrance Examining Board.
As leader of the nation's wealthiest and best-known university, Eliot was necessarily a celebrated figure whose opinions were sought on a wide variety of matters, from tax policy (he offered the first coherent rationale for the charitable tax exemption) to the intellectual welfare of the general public. He edited the Harvard Classics, which together are colloquially known as his Five Foot Shelf and which were intended at the time to suggest a foundation for informed discourse.
Eliot was a fearless crusader not only for educational reform, but for many of the goals of the progressive movement -- whose most prominent figure head was Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) and most eloquent spokesman was Herbert Croly (Class of 1889). He was also involved in philanthropy, serving as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1914 to 1917. |
