The Young Folks' Shelf of Books

The Junior Classics: The Young Folks' Shelf of Books

So as not to let the adults have all the fun with The Harvard Classics, in 1912 Collier's published a set of ten volumes for children entitled The Junior Classics: The Young Folks' Shelf of Books. It doesn't take up a 'five-foot shelf ' as the books for the older readers, but the books are filled with fairy tales and folk tales, the adventures of heroes and heroines, animal and nature stories, and an entire volume of poetry.

This is from the introduction to the junior set written by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, he of Harvard: 

The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. Thoughtful parents and teachers, who realize the evils of indiscriminate reading on the part of children, will appreciate the educational value of such a collection. A child's taste in reading is formed, as a rule, in the first ten or twelve years of its life, and experience has shown that the childish mind will prefer good literature to any other, if access to it is made easy, and will develop far better on literature of proved merit than on trivial or transitory material.

My set, with its dark maroon bindings, came to me from someone in my family.  It was published in 1912 and I am only missing two of the volumes: III (Stories from Greece and Rome) and V (Stories That Never Grow Old). Not bad for a collection that is 100 years old!

There is a Reading Guide in Volume X that gives a list of Best Books to read as further investigation into the type of stories that each volume contains. That is very helpful.

There is an Index of Authors and an Index of Titles as well as a breakdown by school grade of the works appropriate for those ages. Each volume has illustrations which add to the charm.

Among the authors are Aesop, Louisa M. Alcott, Washington Irving, Beatrix Potter, Sir Walter Scott, and William Shakespeare. Titles include The Ugly Duckling, The Sword of Excalibur, O Captain! My Captain! and, A Visit From St. Nicholas. This last selection was bookmarked with a wide red ribbon. A popular choice apparently.

Because my childhood reading was pretty much what Dr. Eliot warns against - "trivial and transitory" - I most likely would benefit from reading some of the selections in The Junior Classics. And even though the pages are a bit musty smelling, the ideas and words and principles they contain continue to be pure and fragrant.

The Five Foot Shelf

Fifty-one volumes: Harvard Classics

In a turn of conversation with The Professor the other day, the Harvard Classics were touched upon. I did a bit of sleuthing about that venerable series and found that the 51-volume anthology of classic works was originally published by Colliers in 1909.

It was known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, as Charles W. Eliot, then president of Harvard, was the unwitting instigator of the project claiming that, according to Wikipedia,  "the elements of a good liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf."

There is everything here from autobiography to Greek drama to essays to fiction and poetry. A fine education indeed.

Today, one can actually access the writings online at Project Gutenberg (here) although that would not be quite as satisfying as sitting down with the actual books and browsing through them reading a bit here and there. 

I also discovered that Christopher Beha wrote an account of a year spent reading all 51 volumes in The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (2009). It is now on my TBR list.

That project reminds me of the wonderfully funny book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs about his year spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.

I don't have the Harvard Classics but I feel as if someone, somewhere in my family did. I do have an incomplete set of Collier's Junior Classics: The Young Folks' Shelf of Books from 1912 that I will write about another time. Book One contains an introduction to the anthology by Dr. "Five-Foot Shelf" Eliot himself.

One can buy sets of the Harvard Classics online and I have seen them at used books stores. Or you might be lucky and find a set at a yard sale or estate sale. Or perhaps you already own your own Five Foot Shelf. If so, I would like to hear about it. How many of the volumes have you read? 

In Which The Professor Pays a Visit

I had quite a literary visit yesterday with my neighbor The Professor. I have mentioned him before...he is in his eighties, is a retired university professor of philosophy, has a house full of books (even though he has sold his 'libraries' twice), and is always seen in a freshly pressed Oxford cloth shirt and tie. I am sometimes the grateful recipient of his well-thumbed 
New York Times Book Review and American Scholar journals.

He is most erudite and is very likely my smartest acquaintance.

It was an abnormally cool August day. I was sitting on my front porch in the late afternoon engrossed in So Big by Edna Ferber when I was greeted by The Professor's cheery hello. He was standing at my gate - he was on his way back from the barbershop - and was in good spirits as usual. I invited him up and we visited for 45 minutes.

In addition to a rousing report on a recent dinner party he attended with a few of his former university colleagues, our conversation ran along these lines:

Jane Austen; the Jane Austen Festival; A Jane Austen Education (which we have both read) and Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (which neither of us has read) ; book clubs; Edna Ferber; Dr. Samuel Johnson's dislike of music (with supporting quotes); The Magic Mountain; Arthur, a mutual friend, long dead, who for years ran one of the first local bookstores; Vanity Fair; P.G. Wodehouse; a surviving independent bookstore and one that has gone away; Florence, Italy; and, the Harvard Classics.

The Professor is like ten book blogs rolled into one! A fine ending to a fine day, wouldn't you say?