What if you could fit a world-class education on a single bookshelf just five feet wide? At the turn of the 20th century, Charles W. Eliot, the longtime president of Harvard University, believed you could. Eliot, who served nearly forty years as Harvard’s president, shocked many by claiming that a person could receive the equivalent of a liberal arts education without attending college, simply by reading the right books at home. His solution became the Harvard Classics, a 50-volume set that would soon be known across America as the five-foot shelf of books.
Eliot’s idea was born in a rapidly changing United States. Industrial jobs were pulling people into cities, immigrants were flooding in, and a new class of “strivers” was eager not only for work, but also for culture and self-improvement. For those who could never dream of attending Harvard, the Harvard Classics set promised an education equal to the one being taught inside the country’s most prestigious classrooms. All Eliot asked was 15 minutes a day with the books.
Working with publisher Peter Collier, Eliot helped select the volumes comprising of Plato, Cicero, Shakespeare, Milton, Augustine, and more. Released in 1909, the Harvard Classics books were marketed brilliantly. Bound in crimson with the Harvard seal, they weren’t just tools of learning but symbols of aspiration. Over the next two decades, more than 350,000 complete sets were sold.
The success of the Harvard Classics five-foot shelf of books spoke to a wider truth: education in America was no longer the exclusive domain of universities. With leisure time growing and literacy expanding, everyday citizens wanted access to the ideas that had shaped civilization.
More than a century later, the Harvard Classics set is still remembered as one of the most ambitious experiments in democratizing education. It showed that books could be the “wisest of counselors and the most patient of teachers,” and that knowledge itself could belong to anyone willing to reach for it.
Source: Valerius Tygart and Wikimedia Commons