Some 64 years ago, on April 15, 1952, the University of Chicago and the Encyclopedia Britannica formally launched the Great Books of the Western World. I cameacross a book from a decade ago that explores how the collection came to be and what became of it, A Great Idea At The Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam.
Beam writes: “There sat a freshly minted set of the
deluxe, faux-leather Great Books, all fifty-four volumes of them,
nine years in the making, stuffed with 443 works by seventy four white male
authors, purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud.
But these books fell short in certain ways. Beam writes: “Only
two nominal twentieth-century writers, William James and Sigmund Freud, made
the cut. No Romantic poets, no Mark Twain, and no Jane Austen. Yet
backed by advertising hype and by unscrupulous, foot-in-the-door salesmen,
Britannica would eventually sell 1 million sets, each costing several hundred
dollars each. Against all odds, the Great Books joined
the roster of postwar fads like drive-ins, hula hoops, and Mexican jumping
beans. Tens of thousands of Americans rushed to join Great Books discussion
groups, prompting Time magazine to print the hilarious claim
that “Great Books has switched many Americans-at least
temporarily-from the works of Spillane those of Spinoza and St. Augustine.”
And then these books sputtered in sales during the 1960s
and flat-lined in the 1970s. they fell off a cliff in the 1980s and have not
been heard from since.
“Among major universities, only Columbia, where the whole
idea began, still force-feeds a much-abbreviated version of the Great
Books curriculum to its undergraduates,” says Beam.
So what criteria was used to determine inclusion into the
series of ‘great books’? Beam uncovered notes from the initial meeting of a
committee gathering in December 1943 that said each book chosen should:
1.
Be important in
itself and without reference to any other, that is, it must be seminal
and radical in its treatment of basic ideas or problems;
2.
Obviously belong to
the tradition in that it is intelligible by other great books, as well as
increasing their intelligibility;
3.
Have an immediate
intelligibility for the ordinary reader even though this may be superficial;
4.
Have many levels of
intelligibility for diverse grades of readers or for a single reader rereading
it many times; and
5.
Be indefinitely
rereadable…It should not be the sort of book that can ever be finally mastered
or finished by any reader.
Interestingly, there were some authors whose works were
agreed upon as destined for inclusion without debate. They, alongside The
Bible, included:
Homer
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripedes
Herodotus
Thucydides
Euclid
Plato
Aristotle
Galen
St. Augustine
St. Thomas
Dante
Machiavelli
Cervantes
Shakespeare
Galileo
Harvey
Newton
Hobbes
Descartes
Spinoza
Pascal
Locke
Hume
Rousseau
Gibbon
Dostoevski
Marx
Tolstoy
Freud
“The culture wars of the 1980s effectively buried
the Great Books in a blizzard of anti-Establishment,
multicultural rhetoric,” says Beam. “The academy turned against the dead white
males whose busts adorned the friezes atop university libraries.”
There still exists The Great Books Foundation and sets of
these books could be found on ebay for several hundred dollars. Many of the
books in the series still hold appeal and value, but collectively, The Great
Books is now just a great footnote to attempts at creating the ultimate reading
list.
To learn more on how to promote books, read my greatest blog posts from the past five years and 2,000 posts:
2016 Book Marketing & Book Publicity Toolkit
2015 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
2014 Book Marketing & PR Toolkit
Book Marketing & Book PR Toolkit: 2013
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