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The Best Bargain in the History of Literature

March 14, 2025

I can't remember exactly when or how I first came across The Harvard Classics, but ever since that day I have been on a mission to get a copy of the collection for myself. The Classics, originally published as: Dr. Elliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books are an absolutely massive, fifty-one volume collection of novels, poetry, history, philosophy, scientific writing, historical documents, and anything else that Dr. Elliot deemed necessary reading to establish a well-rounded liberal education. But the size of the collection isn't what's really special about it. Any fool could copy and paste 200 books into a Word Document, hit print, and self-publish in an effort to profit off of someone else's contributions to the world.

Fortunately, I can say with a high degree of confidence that The Harvard Classics is actually the most unique and complete collection of literature I've every encountered. The collection was put together by Charles William Elliot, who was the President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; a man who established himself as a real stuffy nerd when he tried to ban the playing of football at Harvard, and was later quoted claiming that Rowing and Tennis were the only "clean sports". Despite his anti-sporting rhetoric, Elliot was a prominent member of American Academia at a time when it was much better respected, and objectively more effective than it is today. Plenty of people would argue that the 1950's and 1960's were the true Golden of Age of American Academia; and while I'm not going to argue that they weren't; I will say that Eliot was one of the men best placed in history and proximity to Academia to be able to accurately make decisions about what would fit into the category of required reading. It honestly shouldn't be surprising at all then that this collection contain virtually all of the most influential works of the past three centuries (at least up to 1909 that is), as well as a massive amount of literature pre-dating America itself.

Just as a thought experiment, a few days ago I opened up the table of contents, and made a note of everything that I had either read previously and thought was valuable, or had heard of in high esteem and earmarked for future reading. That list ended up being so long that it's probably a bad idea to put it here in it's entirety; but I can think of no better way to actually prove the point that I'm trying to make:

The first volume alone contains:

However, this is actually a pretty weak start - no offense to Franklin and crew, but the second volume is an absolute unit of ancient Greek philosophy, containing:

It's worth reminding readers here that Socrates himself didn't actually write any of his own philosophy down. Almost all of what we know of Socrates' teachings, we know because it was documented by his peers and students; the foremost of which was Plato. Therefore we're really not only getting the work of Epictetus and Plato here, but also Socrates.

The next three volumes are dedicated to the poetry of:

And throughout the remaining 45 volumes, in no particular order of importance you will find:

The collection also includes miscellaneous writings from:

As well as fables from:

Followed by a pretty massive collection of early US historical artifacts, including:

Finally, we get into the religious texts, which I was surprised to find included more than just the bog standard Judeo-Christian artifacts that you would expect to find in a collection like this:

I hope it's quite clear now why I was so interested in this collection. Basically if you threw in a copy of Zorba the Greek and a couple of Cormac McCrathy novels, I would have everything that I'd really want to read for the rest of my life anyway. What I found most surprising while conducting my little experiment; was the fact that I didn't come across a single volume that looked like it had nothing to offer. Just statistically speaking, you'd think there would be a dud in a collection of fifty books, and there very well might be, but, at least it wasn't immediately obvious which one it would be.

As you can imagine, actually getting your hands on a physical copy of the collection is a bit of an investment. For a while I really couldn't find anywhere that would sell a full-set for less than 4 figures. Eventually however, I did find some eBay sellers who were actually willing to part with their collection for exceedingly reasonable prices. However shipping is still a bit complex, to say the least, and I'm only really wiling to drive so far to pick up some books-- none of that's really relevant though, because it turns out you can get the whole thing for 99¢.

I'm not even being hyperbolic: Completely by chance I was messing around on my Kobo eReader a few days ago, and searched for "Harvard Classics" in the store, expecting to find nothing. I found a result claiming to be the full set, but also on sale from it's normal price of $1.99, for 99¢. I bought the eBook expecting it to be, maybe the first volume, or worse, somebody writing a book about the collection. But when I opened the book, I found that I now had access not only to the original 51 volumes; but also an additional twenty volumes that were published in 1917 under the title: The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. The latter is, exactly what it sounds like: and additional twenty volumes full of nothing but fiction reading.

To be clear this isn't some kind of freak deal in the Kobo Store. This same collection is $1.99 if you buy if from Barnes & Noble for a Nook, $1.99 in the Google Play Store, $1.99 from Apple Books, and please have enough self-respect not to buy it from Amazon -- but it's also 99¢ in the Kindle Store. Don't get me wrong the collection is more than worth the five or six hundred bucks I'd have to pay to get my physical copy, and I'll probably still end up buying my own set at some point in the future. But if it's worth $500 it's definitely worth paying $2 for. I can't think of a single other place where you could acquire this quantity of literature for less than the price of a pack of a gum; and please, feel free to take that as a challenge: if you know of a better bargain now, or discover on in the future; I'll be here eagerly waiting to here about it.