An Outline of Great Books: The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

This past week I was triggered by a New York Times article titled, The Books Times Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer. The subhead reiterates. "As summer kicks off, here are the new books that our readers say they’re most eager to dive into."

When I see articles like this, my first thought is, "How many of these books will stand the test of time?" It seems to me that since there are so many truly great books from the world's great writers that most of us have never read, why not spent your summer reading a few of the great works from the past that have shaped our minds and our world? It's just so "modern" to ever be chasing "the latest shiny new toys."

The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

In 1982 or '83 I stopped at the yard sale of someone who was clearly educated. This was in the vicinty of Hamline Unversity in St. Paul. They were selling books by the bag, ten books for a dollar. 

One of the the books I acquired was a battered copy of the 1936 Outline of Great Books, edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, an ambitious attempt to make the world's classic literature accessible to ordinary readers. Rather than reproducing the complete texts, it provides substantial outlines, summaries, and excerpts from approximately 250 of the Western world's most important works in history, philosophy, science, religion, poetry, biography, travel, and criticism. 

Hammerton's project was an attempt to give readers a guided tour of civilization's intellectual heritage. These were the days before television and long before the internet.

Click to enlarge

For me, it was a useful tool for broadening my education. In Sherwood Wirt's You Can Tell the World, he begins by emphasizing our need (he is addressing Christian writers, but his admonition applies to all writers) to understand the great minds and read the great books if we are aiming to influence the world. Outline of Great Books is thus a tool for becoming aware of the important players in the various scholarly disciplines. It's more than a Cliff's Notes version of the great ideas and themes of Western literature. It is comprised of excerpts from their actual writings. A person living in a small farming town might never have access to Aristotle, Dante, Gibbon, Goethe, Cervantes, or Tolstoy, but they could obtain a familiarity with their ideas and writings here.

 

What I find especially interesting is that the book no doubt inspired people to read the originals. Many families owned only a few dozen books. Outline of Great Books functioned almost like a literary map. You could read a 10–20 page condensation of a work and decide whether you wanted to pursue the full text.

The work belongs to a larger "outline" movement of the early twentieth century, alongside books like The Outline of History and other educational compendia that sought to democratize knowledge. Will and Ariel Durant released the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization around this same time, a history in more layman's terms than academic.

Outline of Great Books reflects a worldview that was common among educators of the era: An educated person should possess at least a working acquaintance with the great books that shaped Western civilization. Sadly, that assumption has largely disappeared today.

I won't deny that the book has limitations. It's focus is primarily on the great books of Western civilization, and even the section on religion omits the religions of other regions of the world. Nevertheless, it's an impressive compendium and I've pulled it off the shelf more than a few times over the years. (In fact, just two weeks ago I pulled it out to see what scientists were covered, and specifically to check out which of Sir Isaac Newton's works were cited.

It's interesting who is included and excluded in a volume such as this. Also, I'm curious if books like this will ever be published again. Everything people want can be found somewhere on the Internet now, it seems. If you can't find it, you ask Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT or some other LLM. 

What interests people today seems to be podcasts of contemporaries talking about their contemporary writing and contemporary history, so that Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Carlyle, Hume, Schopenhauer, Goethe and the like are now relics. Who reads Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire any more? We've been told we are now living it, but what really happened in Rome 1600-1700 years ago that resulted in its downfall?

The real point I want to make, though, is how I found this gem for 10 cents. It was a treasure at a bargain price. If your eyes are open, there are probably countless overlooked treasures all around us. When it comes to books, library sales and used book stores are repositories of riches. Open your eyes.

How Literature Elevates Us

In light of Tuesday night's presentation on Picasso, Storytelling and The Unseen Masterpiece, this seemed a suitable follow-up while being a nod to Throwback Thursday. This originally appeared on August 19, five summers ago.

In addition to the philosophy club which we host, Susie has been for ten years involved with a Barnes & Noble classic books club in which each month the group reads and discusses some of the world's great literature. The group has seen its share of ebb and flow but one constant throughout has been the classics, literature that goes beyond its moment in time.

What's the difference between a good book and a classic? To illustrate, I'll point to the business book Built to Last by Jim Collins. In Collins' analysis, the great companies are those that have dedicated themselves to the long haul. They hang their shingle on the word excellence at every level of the game. By way of contrast, and this was the plight of the tech bubble, many companies were being built to flip. That is, from the outside they looked like good companies but the management disregarded strengthening the foundations for the sole aim of getting bought out at a very high price, bringing profits the stakeholders.

So it is that writers have different aims when they produce books. The Jonestown Massacre took place the year I worked in a bookstore in Puerto Rico, in 1978. The Peoples Temple tragedy occurred in November, and to my utter amazement two books appeared on this topic before the end of the year. These books, long forgotten now, would not be deemed literature. They were rushed to market with the intent of exploiting the moment and are examples of a "built to flip" style of writing.

Books written to exploit the moment are not necessarily bad books, and can be informative, often timely and have a measure of value, though many are clearly written with the hope of making a buck, its only aim quite transparent. On the other hand, classics aspire to something greater. Classic fiction strives to participate in the great dialogue, our human story, bringing additional light into the great battle of light verses darkness. Unlike books on how to make a killing on Wall Street or how to raise your son to be a doctor, the great stories wrestle with ethical issues, the problem of evil and questions like Why am I here? Where did I come from? Who am I and what is my life about?

In other words, the great books deal with great themes.

Another factor in the great books is the writing itself. The importance of the theme motivates the great writers to strive for a perfection of language that is effective for higher purposes, laboring over his selection of words and sentences to more eloquently convey the ideas and the story. Hence the phrase belles letres, beautiful letters. The aim is not only a worthy theme, but writing that is worthy of the theme.

My view on these matters has been significantly shaped by John Gardner, who wrote, "Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations." (The Art of Fiction)

Gardner's high view of literature stems from a high view of humankind.

Leo Tolstoy had this to say about the writer's task: "The main purpose of art... is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets one cannot say in simple words.... Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."

There are two metaphors I've frequently used regarding our personal stories, which help us not only understand our human condition but also help us to better understand God. The first is the image of a chandelier. Picture a large ball of cut glass (or jewels, diamonds, whatever) and in the middle is the light, which we cannot see, but which is reflected through each jewel. We are the jewels. Our stories, and transparency, make the light more vivid. We each make a contribution to the human story, and our role is to do it the best we are able, first in learning how to understand our stories and then fine tuning our ability to communicate the story.

The second image is that of a fly's eye. (Yes, I know flies are creepy to to people, but go with me on this.) The eye of a fly has two thousand faces, which enables it to see in multiple directions. These multiple images are then synthesized in the fly's brain into something coherent. So it is with our own manifold stories. Each contributes to the whole of our understanding of the human situation.

Remember growing up and thinking every family was like yours? Then you discover that not only families are different, lives are totally different based on where you are from, etc.

I'm out of time and will have to leave off discussing Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country or Andre Gide's Two Symphonies, Melville's Moby Dick or Dickens, Conrad and Twain.

If you write, aim high. In the process you will not only achieve more for yourself, but might lift others as well. Let your light shine and your story be told.