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A Digital or Virtual LIBRARY comprising of Free "eBooks" ~ Articles ~ Discussions ~ Posts ~ Links ~ Photos ~ Videos about "AUTEUR" Films ~ FICTION ~ Poetry ~ Arts & Literature ~ Theatre ~ Philosophy ~ Psychology ~ Music ~ Science ~ Culture



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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

“Gateway to the Great Books” (10 Vols.)



“Gateway to the Great Books” (10 Vols.)



Editors in Chief: ROBERT M. HUTCHINS, MORTIMER J. ADLER

Associate Editor: CLIFTON FADIMAN



ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, INC. / 1990 / 10 Vols. / 5,000 pages



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“Gateway to the Great Books” is a 10-volume series of books originally published by ‘Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.’ in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the “Great Books of the Western World”, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. The set included selections - short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works - by more than one hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in the “Great Books”.



Authors

A number of authors in the “Great Books” set - such as Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Dante, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and William James - were also represented by shorter works in the “Gateway Volumes”. And several “Gateway Readings” discussed authors in the “Great Books” series. For instance, a selection from Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres critiqued the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, many writers in the “Gateway Set” were eventually “promoted” to the Second Edition (1990) of the “Great Books”, such as Alexis de Toqueville, Molière, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and John Dewey.



Index, editorial material, criticism

The set included an index similar to the Great Books’ Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty. Hutchins contributed an introduction that was essentially a boiled-down version of “The Great Conversation”, his preface to the “Great Books”. The set contained biographical notes on the various authors, similar to those in the “Great Books”. However, the set also contained editorial introductions to the selections, which were generally not included in the “Great Books”. In another departure from the “Great Books Series”, the set included black-and-white drawings of most of the authors by Chicago portraitist Fred Steffen, who also wrote brief notes describing the illustrations. Details from a number of these drawings were featured on the volume covers. Although the editors maintained that many selections were appropriate to young readers, the set included a fair amount of material challenging for the most experienced reader. In what may have been a response to complaints about the cramped typography of the “Great Books”, the “Gateway Volumes” were single-column with larger, more readable type. Many of the same criticisms leveled at the “Great Books” can be made of the “Gateway Set”. The books concentrated heavily on Western European and American literature and included few selections by women or minority authors.

"The Set is now out of print".


Contents



Volume 1: Introduction; Syntopical Guide:

A letter to the reader

Introduction

Syntopical guide

Appendices

A plan of graded reading

Recommended novels

Recommended anthologies of poetry



Volume 2: Imaginative Literature I:

Daniel Defoe, Excerpts from Robinson Crusoe

Rudyard Kipling, “Mowgli’s Brothers” from The Jungle Book

Victor Hugo, “The Battle with the Cannon” from Ninety-Three

Guy de Maupassant, “Two Friends”

Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” from Men Without Women

Sir Walter Scott, “The Two Drovers” from Chronicles of the Canongate

Joseph Conrad, “Youth”

Voltaire, Micromegas

Oscar Wilde, “The Happy Prince” from The Happy Prince and Other Tales

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

Charles Dickens, “A Full and Faithful Report of the Memorable Trial of Bardell against Pickwick” from The Pickwick Papers

Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”

Samuel Butler, “Customs and Opinions of the Erewhonians” from Erewhon

Sherwood Anderson, “I'm a Fool”

Anonymous, Aucassin and Nicolette



Volume 3: Imaginative Literature II:

Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

Herman Melville, "Billy Budd"

Ivan Bunin, "The Gentleman from San Francisco"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter"

George Eliot, "The Lifted Veil"

Lucius Apuleius, "Cupid and Psyche" from The Golden Ass

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, "White Nights"

John Galsworthy, "The Apple-Tree"

Gustave Flaubert, "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"

Honoré de Balzac, "A Passion in the Desert"

Anton Chekhov, "The Darling"

Isaac Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street"

Alexander Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades"

D. H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Henry James, "The Pupil"

Thomas Mann, "Mario and the Magician"

Isak Dinesen, "Sorrow-Acre"

Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch", "The Three Hermits", "What Men Live By"



Volume 4: Imaginative Literature III:

Molière, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself

Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny

John Synge, Riders to the Sea

Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones



Volume 5: Critical Essays:

Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?"

Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry", "Sweetness and Light"

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, "What Is a Classic?", "Montaigne"

Francis Bacon, "Of Beauty", "Of Discourse", "Of Studies"

David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste"

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Style", "On Some Forms of Literature", "On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art"

Friedrich Schiller, "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

William Hazlitt, "My First Acquaintance with Poets", "On Swift", "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen"

Charles Lamb, "My First Play", "Dream Children, a Reverie", "Sanity of True Genius"

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Thomas de Quincey, Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power", "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth"

T. S. Eliot, "Dante", "Tradition and the Individual Talent"



Volume 6: Man and Society I:

John Stuart Mill, "Childhood and Youth" from Autobiography

Mark Twain, "Learning the River" from Life on the Mississippi

Jean de la Bruyere, "Characters" from A Book of Characters

Thomas Carlyle, 'The Hero as King" from On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoreau"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Sketch of Abraham Lincoln"

Walt Whitman, "Death of Abraham Lincoln"

Virginia Woolf, "The Art of Biography"

Xenophon, "The March to the Sea" from The Persian Expedition, "The Character of Socrates" from Memorabilia

William H. Prescott, "The Land of Montezuma" from The Conquest of Mexico

Haniel Long, "The Power within Us"

Pliny the Younger, "The Eruption of Vesuvius"

Tacitus, "The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola"

Francois Guizot, "Civilization" from History of Civilization in Europe

Henry Adams, "The United States in 1800" from History of the United States of America

John Bagnell Bury, "Herodotus" from The Ancient Greek Historians

Lucian, "The Way to Write History"

Great Documents

The English Bill of Rights

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

The Declaration of Independence

Charter of the United Nations

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Thomas Paine, "A Call to Patriots - December 23, 1776"

George Washington, "Circular Letter to the Governors of All the States on Disbanding the Army", "The Farewell Address"

Thomas Jefferson, "The Virginia Constitution" from Notes on Virginia, "First Inaugural Address", "Biographical Sketches"

Benjamin Franklin, "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America", "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania"

Jean de Crevecoeur, "The Making of Americans" from Letters from an American Farmer

Alexis de Tocqueville, "Observations on American Life and Government" from Democracy in America

Henry David Thoreau,"Civil Disobedience", "A Plea for Captain John Brown"

Abraham Lincoln, "Address at Cooper Institute", "First Inaugural Address", "Letter to Horace Greeley", "Meditation on the Divine Will", "The Gettysburg Address", "Second Inaugural Address", "Last Public Address".



Volume 7: Man and Society II:

Francis Bacon, "Of Youth and Age", "Of Parents and Children", "Of Marriage and Single Life", "Of Great Place", "Of Seditions and Troubles", "Of Custom and Education", "Of Followers and Friends", "Of Usury", "Of Riches"

Jonathan Swift, "Resolutions when I Come to Be Old", "An Essay on Modern Education", "A Meditation upon a Broomstick", "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country"

David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts", "Of Money", "Of the Balance of Trade", "Of Taxes", "Of the Study of History"

Plutarch, "Of Bashfulness"

Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Lantern-Bearers" from Across the Plains

John Ruskin, "An Idealist's Arraignment of the Age" from Four Clavigera

William James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings", "The Energies of Men", "Great Men and Their Environment"

Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Education"

Michael Faraday, "Observations on Mental Education"

Edmund Burke, "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol"

John Calhoun, "The Concurrent Majority"

Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Machiavelli"

Voltaire, "English Men and Ideas" from Letters on the English

Dante, "On World Government" from De Monarchia

Jean Jacques Rousseau, "A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe"

Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace"

Karl von Clausewitz, "What Is War?" from On War

Thomas Robert Malthus, "The Principle of Population" from Population: The First Essay



Volume 8: Natural Science:

Francis Bacon, "The Sphinx"

John Tyndall, "Michael Faraday" from Faraday as a Discoverer

Eve Curie, "The Discovery of Radium" from Madame Curie

Charles Darwin, "Autobiography"

Jean Henri Fabre, "A Laboratory of the Open Fields", "The Sacred Beetle"

Loren Eiseley, "On Time"

Rachel Carson, "The Sunless Sea" from The Sea Around Us

J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" from Possible Worlds

Thomas Henry Huxley, "On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals", "On a Piece of Chalk"

Francis Galton, "The Classification of Human Ability" from Hereditary Genius

Claude Bernard, "Experimental Considerations Common to Living Things and Inorganic Bodies"

Ivan Pavlov, "Scientific Study of the So-called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals"

Friedrich Wohler, "On the Artificial Production of Urea"

Charles Lyell, "Geological Evolution" from The Principles of Geology

Galileo, "The Starry Messenger"

Tommaso Campanella, "Arguments for and against Galileo" from The Defense of Galileo

Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle

Dmitri Mendeleev, "The Genesis of a Law of Nature" from The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements

Hermann von Helmholtz, "On the Conservation of Force"

Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, "The Rise and Decline of Classical Physics" from The Evolution of Physics

Arthur Eddington, "The Running-Down of the Universe" from Nature and the Physical World

James Jeans, "Beginnings and Endings" from The Universe Around Us

Kees Boeke, "Cosmic View"



Volume 9: Mathematics:

Lancelot Hogben, "Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization" from Mathematics for the Million

Andrew Russell Forsyth, "Mathematics, in Life and Thought"

Alfred North Whitehead, "On Mathematical Method", "On the Nature of a Calculus"

Bertrand Russell, "The Study of Mathematics", "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians", "Definition of Number"

Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, "New Names for Old", "Beyond the Googol"

Tobias Dantzig, "Fingerprints", "The Empty Column"

Leonhard Euler, "The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg"

Norman Robert Campbell, "Measurement", "Numerical Laws and the Use of Mathematics in Science"

William Clifford, "The Postulates of the Science of Space" from The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences

Henri Poincare, "Space", "Mathematical Creation", "Chance"

Pierre Simon de Laplace, "Probability" from A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Red and the Black"



Volume 10: Philosophical Essays:

John Erskine, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent"

William Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief"

William James, "The Will to Believe", "The Sentiment of Rationality"

John Dewey, "The Process of Thought" from How We Think

Epicurus, "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoeceus"

Epictetus, The Enchiridion

Walter Pater, "The Art of Life" from The Renaissance

Plutarch, "Contentment"

Cicero, "On Friendship", "On Old Age"

Francis Bacon, "Of Truth", "Of Death", "Of Adversity", "Of Love", "Of Friendship", "Of Anger"

George Santayana, "Lucretius", "Goethe's Faust"

Henry Adams, "St. Thomas Aquinas" from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Voltaire, "The Philosophy of Common Sense"

John Stuart Mill, "Nature"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature", "Self-Reliance", "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic"

William Hazlitt, "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth"

Thomas Browne, "Immortality" from Urn-Burial

1 comments:

Tracy May 25, 2011 at 7:15 AM  

Thanks for the tip to this collection! As a reading fan who has never dove into the "Greats", this collection would be a crucial asset in exploring the masters of eras before. Great article!

The Black Book ~ Orhan Pamuk

Snow ~ Orhan Pamuk

Istanbul: Memories and the City ~ Orhan Pamuk

My Name Is Red ~ Orhan Pamuk

1Q84 Book 1 ~ Haruki Murakami

1q84 Book 2 ~ Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words ~ Jay Rubin

Murakami Diary 2009 ~ Haruki Murakami

After Dark (Vintage International) ~ Haruki Murakami

When Nietzsche Wept ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Kafka on the Shore ~ Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood ~ Haruki Murakami

Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel ~ J. M. Coetzee

Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections ~ John O'Brien

Slowness: A Novel ~ Milan Kundera

Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art ~ Gene H. Bell-Villada

Borges: A Life ~ Edwin Williamson

Collected Fictions ~ Borges

Labyrinths ~ Borges

Baltasar and Blimunda ~ Jose Saramago

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ ~ Jose Saramago

Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday ~ Italo Calvino

The Baron in the Trees ~ Italo Calvino

J.S. Bach: The Art of Fugue

What is /Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"} ?


A Digital or Virtual LIBRARY comprising of Free "eBooks" ~ Articles ~ Discussions ~ Posts ~ Links ~ Photos ~ Videos about "AUTEUR" Films ~ FICTION ~ Poetry ~ Arts & Literature ~ Theatre ~ Philosophy ~ Psychology ~ Music ~ Science ~ Culture etc.

Library.Babel
Interests: Schizophrenia, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Autism... Andrzej Tarkovsky... Ingmar Bergman... Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera... M.D. Ramanathan, Kumar Gandharva... J.S. Bach, Wagner...

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

~ The {Title} is taken from Borges' {The Library at Babel} ~

Borges' "The Library at Babel" is a story that encompasses a world. The world that is a library, a library that is a universe broken into endless hexagons connected by stairs and hallways. It's unlike any library that has ever existed, a library of the mind, a virtual library, and as such the source of imaginative illustration. I've encountered pictures of its hexagonal galleries and infinite air shafts on Web Sites, and recently the story was re-published in hardcover with engravings by Erik Desmazieres, who gave the Library's interior a spooky look that I associate with the interiors of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction. Many, of course, would choose to interpret the story in a more philosophical manner. Certainly a case can be made to see the story as a parable about man's search for God, or man's essential ignorance of the world, or of the chaos of the universe. While I acknowledge the story's visual and philosophical qualities, it has a personal connection. It evokes what I would call the large-library experience. Borges' nameless librarian, an administrator of some minor sort - if the library is infinite, all administrators are minor - recollects, "Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book." Reading this, I think of my own rambles through stacks and shelves both as a student and an unattached "scholar." I've wandered through libraries looking for or just at books, feeling their collective weight, reading titles, puzzling at the cipher of numbers and letters by which they are classified. I have been lost in corridors of books like one drifting through the pinched streets of some foreign town, though indeed these rambles have taken part in and around my home. Books as realia have been part of this attraction. Strolling between shelves of bound volumes, I feel I'm pressed between the scales of some vast and dormant beast. Opened, each book presents a small bracket of hard space and distilled experience that, when joined in imagination with other books, create the sensation of time congealed. Books in vast quantities form a reality greater than the sum of their parts. Unlike museums, whether of science or art, that enfold me in a history of eras and schools and "movements," large libraries point beyond their realia. They go from the tangible to the intangible, from the temporal to the timeless, from the momentary to the eternal. Masses of books suggest the infinite. - Garrett Rowlan

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"} is dedicated to:

My Eternal Lover & Mentor ~
"Jorge Luis Borges"



/Library Ticket/



I've travelled the World twice over,

Met the famous: Saints and Sinners,

Poets and Artists, Kings and Queens,

Old stars and hopeful Beginners,

I've been where no-one's been before,

Learned secrets from Writers
and Cooks,

All with one "Library Ticket",

To the wonderful World of books.


- JANICE JAMES



The movement of atoms is eternal.


Thrown through the void,
either by their own weight
or by the impact of other atoms,
they wander
until chance brings them together.


Some of them manage to cling together;
they form the most solid bodies.


Others,
more mobile,
are separated by a greater distance;
they form the less dense bodies,
air and light.


Some did not wish to be admitted to any group;
they move around gloriously and endlessly in space,
like dust motes lit up by rays of light in a dark room.

[from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, recited by Rousseau in La vallée close]



~ This seemingly simple poetry reminds us that every work of Art is relative to the Grand Time wherein it was sprout, and is to be judged thus. We won't/ might not hold a good opinion when we read and consider these lines now, after two decades of Stephen Hawking and 'A Brief History of Time'. This poem was written in First Century BC, by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Now, do we ought to re-think and re-consider our opinion? Epicurean Physics, atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, arguments about God, Lucretius' Physics - everything is here, in these simple lines of poetry ~




Concept & Design:
Library.Babel