This however got me thinking again about the Encyclopedia Brittanica's epic curated collection of The Great Books of the Western World (GBOTWW). If you were rich and wished to flaunt your education, there was no better icon than this bookcase of handsome books! I went through a phase where I lusted after a set of these books so badly I could taste it! Coming from a working class background, they represented to me a secret path to the further education that money and birth had denied me. There was even a ten year reading plan in Vol 1 (p112-131, see more HERE) that was meant to guide you through these 'great books'.
You just had to see them, ranked up on a bookshelf in their state of the art bindings to get a sense that they were a conscious distillation of human knowledge throughout history. I'm a product of my 60's era upbringing, an upbringing that was fixated on the supremacy of the Western world and the idea that seminal works held secrets that their study could reveal about the human condition.
Sanity prevaled. We were a young couple wanting to start a family and the cost of a set of theses books didn't factor in easily with our practical needs. Life intervened - I'm sure you have had similar pressures - and along the way I started to question whether these books really did have relevance in the modern world as the collection became a quarter of a century old.
Thirty-something years later I am retired and find myself revisiting them. Whilst I now have the spare time to read widely, that doesn't mean I can invest ten years in a reading program nor, for that matter, does it mean I have the spare cash to buy the collection or even the shelf space to store it! Fortunately in this digital age, knowledge has become free or at least affordable and can be shrunk to the size of the digital memory that records it.
A night's Googling (that was fun) found that the University of Adelaide had alternative editions of most of the books (that was good) but following their link I found that their online library has been closed down (that's TERRIBLE!). Such a travesty could not be allowed to go unchallenged! The news is not all bad. The 'Wayback Machine' has most of the University's downloads available at this time most if not all of the books available for download and elsewhere on Archive.org has them in other editions and formats, Librivox even has many of them as free audiobooks
So now I have a new reading and publishing project. To find them, precis them, and record for others what I have found. I've started a Google Sites website to record a comprehensive catalogue of the books in the collection, on a number of levels...
- To find and link to copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica's GBOTWW that are available online to download or borrow.
- To find and link to copies of any other editions or translations of the same book with critiques of each
- To analyse the books and to make a few personal comments about them
I've started level one of the project for the first ten volumes of the GBOTWW on this website so, if you feel the urge to paddle your feet in the classics, go for it! Level 2 is mostly a matter of searching for links, time consuming but not exactly challenging. Level 3 is the challenge, to write up my own thoughts about the book! Although I'm not going to read the books in any great detail - let's get real here: one of them is the complete works of Shakespeare! - the internet gives us access to scholars who have, who can help us place them into context and distil their effect even more.
However there we have the great conundrum of life! Is the search for knowledge simply to distil the interpretations of others? Or should I start from scratch, read the originals and make my own conclusions?
The adventure is in the journey! Let's see where this goes!
