Charles W. Eliot, educational reformer and long-time Harvard
president, was fond of remarking that a five-foot shelf could hold
enough books to substitute for a good liberal education. As Eliot
approached retirement, P.F. Collier & Son Publishers invited him to
compile fifty volumes, each between 400 and 450 pages, to fill that
shelf. Eliot quickly accepted, and the first volume appeared early in
1909. Known colloquially as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf,
the
Harvard Classics became a topic of intense discussion in both literary
circles and the mainstream press. An editor's introduction and a
reader's guide rounded out the project in early 1910, and Collier's
began selling complete fifty-one volume sets. By the time of Eliot's
death in 1926, they had sold almost 300,000 of them, amounting to more
than 14 million individual volumes. Subsequent sets of Eliot's
recommended fiction and Junior Classics
also sold well.
Over the course of 2007, I read the Harvard Classics in their entirety, roughly one volume a week. The Whole Five Feet documented this year of reading.