I just recently discovered this amazing set of books from Britannica - Great Books of the Western World. 60 volumes of classic stuff from Socrates to Einstein. Pretty amazing, and it has tons of stuff that I’ve always wanted to read but never have. I figure that since my spare time for reading is somewhat limited these days, it would take me four to five years to read the whole thing. Whuddya think? Should I shell out the $1100 bucks for it?
I’d wager there’s not a single work in that set you can’t find on the shelf of your local library. So, why shell out over a thousand bucks for a collection of books you could get and read at your leisure, any time, for free?
Well, because the library doesn’t let you keep their stuff.
I like to go back and refer to books I’ve read constantly, which is why I usually end up buying books instead of borrowing them.
Hmmmm… tough call.
At $1195 for 60 books, that’s ~$20 apiece. I’d bet you could find them all substantially cheaper than that at bookshops and resellers and what not. Since you can’t read them all at once anyway, you accumulate (and pay for them) as you go. Of course, you wouldn’t have a nice matching, hardcover set then either.
In the end, it’ll depend on what you like (and need) to spend your money on.
PS I’m thinking of doing the same thing with St John’s University’s list of great books
Have fun!
i think i have the exact same collection, albeit a slighly older version bought for me and my brother around 10 years ago by my parents.
The collection itself is pretty substantial, but i’m not sure if it is value for money; as with most purchases it depends on your financial situation. But do you really need all of those books? At a humble age of 17, and only recently in my opinion mature enough to appreciate and understand such a collection, it would take years to wade through such a wealth of knowledge.
recently i have been reading through the syntopicon volumes which basically collate in essay form how the great writers have interpreted certain ideas e.g. love, death, beauty, and i guess they are an excellent introduction to themes for someone as perhaps ignorant as me to such philosophical/mathematical/political etc. themes
P.S not sure how much the collection has moved on since 1992 buit i suppose its pretty much the same.
Screw the library and Britannica. Almost every single on of those books are public domain, and you can find them all free on the Internet. I’d read the books on the Internet and donate the thousand bucks (or at least a couple hundred) to a group that buys books for underpriledged kids who may never otherwise have any books of their own.
I’m a book buyer myself. For some reason I just have a real hard time reading a book that I don’t actually own. I would be very tempted by a set like this because I used to subscribe to the “Library of America.” It was a nice enough set, but then I found that I was paying for books that I’d probably never actually read. So if you have to buy books (which I heartily recommend; a house is not a house without a well-stocked library) find the titles that interest you and begin a collection of your own.
Yeah, about $20 per book, but there are 517 individual works. That’s about $2.30 per classic work.
Project Gutenberg might have a number of those books for free…
That’s a lot of money for a set of books that probably won’t appreciate in value. However, if you want a nice set of coordinated books to pretty up your den, go for it. If you’re interested in the type of comparative reading this set facilitates, it will be a great help.
If you’re simply interested in reading some of the classics, you can accomplish that in a much more affordable way.
I like owning my own books as well, so I vote go for it. If that is the set you like, and you can afford it, I don’t see a reason not to buy the books. You can enjoy them for years, and they’d make a nice gift to hand down through the family.
I personally, am a fan of Easton Press books. I like being able to pick and choose which volumes I want. I also like The Harvard Classics but wouldn’t buy this set since I wouldn’t read all of them. It hasn’t stopped me from picking up volumes I do like second hand. With a larger budget, I’d have no qualms about buying an entire set.
Moderator’s note:
Off to Cafe Society.
TVeblen,
IMHO mod
At bookfinder dot com you can get an earlier edition used for 450-500 bucks. That edition has only 54 volumes, not the 60 advertised in your link.
Food for though.
-Myron
You don’t need to buy the set new for $1195. Go to almost any large used book store and you’ll find a copy of the entire set that’s only a few years old and still in nearly perfect shape. I bought my copy of the books that way a few years ago and only paid $500. I could have done even better if I had looked a little harder though, since I’ve seen the set sold used for $400.
- I grew up with the 54 volume edition in a book case at the top of the stairs. As a young child, I longed to be able to read it all one day. I’m nearly there.
- You buy a set on eBay for $200. Go for it:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2Fws%2F&krd=1&from=R8&MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&SortProperty=MetaEndSort&query=britannica+great+books - The translations are good - Jowett’s Plato, and Constance Garnett’s Dosteyevsky, for example.
even sven
Call me old fashioned, but I just can’t read anything longer than your average Straight Dope thread on the internet. Staring at a screen for that long makes my eyes go all wonky. And printing all of it out would take a very long time. I do appreciate the Gutenburg project though – I’ve given them lots of money anyway.
The Man Who
Now that is an interesting idea - I may just investigate that.
May I suggest the Everyman’s Library series? They have about 1000 of the greatest works of literature in their series. The old editions are still good and available from any good used bookseller, but if you insist on new volumes, they are still available for $20 at the most expensive. (Some are as cheap as $12.50) All are printed on acid-free paper, with full-cloth sewn bindings, with a sewn-in silk ribbon bookmark. That way you can buy each book as you become interested in it, with no big up-front outlay for books you may never read.
An excellent suggestion, Mister. I shall investigate.
-friedo (an Everyman.)
Personally, I own precisely one of the volumes: a second-hand copy of the old vol.16 with Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. It’s hardly a typical volume in that these are not texts that one actually reads in any conventional sense. I’d guess they’d be about the last in the set any average reader, no matter how masochistic, would look at. For me, it’s no more than a handy, cheap reference copy of the Almagest and De revolutionibus. Indeed Otto Neugebauer gave this particular volume a savage review back in 1955 (*Isis, XLVI, 69):
The review also noted a whole swathe of factual mistakes in the translation.
From roughly the same period, there’s a more general review of the project by the historian of science I. Bernard Cohen (sorry, don’t have the reference) that’s similarly scathing. To him the editors were wedded to a wrongheaded view of the history of science as a set of texts by Great Men with no context. That idea was outdated even then and it hasn’t come back into fashion. Cohen thus considered the set actively misleading.
I’d suspect that for any individual writer, something like the equivalent Penguin Classics edition (though they don’t help with these three particular authors) would be preferable in terms of a recent translation and up-to-date scholarship.
Oh, and a couple of disclaimers. The current catalog of Everyman’s Library only lists 345 books available as new. If you don’t mind buying used, that’s not a problem, of course. And they are adding to this list every year, so if you start with the ones you like the most, the rest of the ones on your want list may be available by the time you finish reading the first set.
And secondly, I notice that a few of the books (definitely a minority) are more than the $20 that I mentioned. But most of those are multiple novels by the same author, such as the collected The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The High Window by Raymond Chandler in one volume for $27.
And lastly, I forgot to include the link to the online catalog which is: Everyman’s Library