July 16, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, what if everything you needed to know about the world could fit on a bookshelf just five feet wide? Harvard President Charles W. Eliot believed it could. In an era when few had access to higher education, Eliot championed the Harvard Classics, a set of books designed to give anyone a world-class education from their own home.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. And now we've
been you one of our favorite contributors and producers, John Elfner,
to tell us the story of the iconic book collection
known as the Harvard Classics, created by a president of
Harvard from the eighteen hundreds because of his unusual philosophy
on education.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
In the early nineteen hundreds, a man named Charles Elliott
made this.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Bold claim one could get a first class education from
a shelf of books five feet law.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
That claim might strike some as surprising, but what is
even more surprising is that this man, Charles Elliot, was
president of Harvard University, a position he held for nearly
forty years. It seems odd that the president of America's
most prestigious university would say you don't need a school
to become educated. But if you know a little more
about Charles Elliott and the United States at the turn
of the century, this statement makes more sense. During the
(01:06):
early nineteen hundreds, the United States was experiencing rapid transformation.
The American Industrial Revolution created loads of factory jobs, which
were luring farmers from rural America and immigrants from across
the ocean to American cities.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
The population of the cities was skyrocketing during this period.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That's doctor Robert Johnston. He's a history professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's an expert on
this period.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
The social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century in the United States were among the most momentous
in our nation's history. People came from all over the
globe so that they could have better lives for themselves
and for their children.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Of course, they were drawn to America to improve their
economic circumstances. But for many there was more to it
than that.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
We might call these people strivers, people who really sought
to improve themselves in what we think of as a
classic American way.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
The desire of these drivers to improve themselves was recognized
by members of America's established elite class, and none was
more elite than doctor Charles Elliott, the longest serving president
of Harvard University. You heard Elliott's clim at the beginning
of the story about the possibility of an education minus
a university, and that was no hollow claim from Elliott.
He had spent his last four decades as Harvard's president
(02:21):
transforming the institution from its original mission as a minister's
training school to become a leading liberal arts college. As
Elliott was nearing retirement, he began to consider how his
transformation of Harvard could be shared more broadly with those
who couldn't attend a university.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Of course, the problem was that still very few people
could go to college, not just Harvard, but any college.
And so what would you do if you want to
create an opportunity for everyone?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Elliott saw the nation's emerging striver class and began speaking
to them on their terms. What if he imagined the
classics taught at Harvard could be made more widely available,
especially to those who couldn't afford to take four years
off of work to attend a university. Central to that
vision was his belief in the power of the written
word to educate anyone. I'm telling you, this guy loved books,
(03:09):
and he believed books, not teachers, were the surest path
to becoming educated.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. They
are the most successible and wisest of counselors, and the
most patient of teachers.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
He even began to share in public addresses his belief
that a university may not be necessary to become what
he called a cultivated man.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
A three foot shelf would hold books enough to afford
a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who
would read them with devotion, even if he could spare
but fifteen minutes a day for reading.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Fifteen minutes a day, that's all it would take. And
doctor Elliott's bookshelf was the right idea at the right time.
There was a public appetite for something like this. Here again,
is doctor Robert Johnston.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Part of thinking of better lives, of capturing the American
dream was not just about making money and buying a
better house, but in fact becoming cultured. And to do
that people realized that they wanted to be educated in
a very broad and liberal way.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Elliott later amended his estimation of the size of the
bookshelf to five feet, and his frequent references to this
idea earned it the name doctor Elliott's five foot bookshelf.
But it's not clear that this idea was anything Elliot
ever intended to actually create. Sure, it was consistent with
his ideas about the value of liberal arts education, but
for Elliott, this five foot bookshelf idea seems to have
(04:33):
been more of a rhetorical flourish than an actual intention,
And it was an easy claim to make, since he
likely assumed he'd never have to test the ability of
his bookshelf to educate. That was until Peter Collier, one
of the nation's biggest publishers, heard Elliott make this claim
in his speech and said to Elliott, Oh, yeah, prove it.
Peter Collier was the publisher of Collier's magazine. Colliers built
(04:57):
itself as a weekly collection of fact, fiction, sensation, in wit, humor,
and news. The magazine featured prominent writers including Jack London,
upt In Sinclair, and the creator of Sherlock Homes, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, and the public aided up. Colliers was
first published in eighteen eighty eight, and by eighteen ninety
two it was going to a quarter of a million
homes in America. By the time Charles Elliott was publicly
(05:19):
ruminating about his five foot bookshelf, that number had grown
to half a million. And why was there such a
large audience for a magazine like Colliers at this time?
It was because the changing nature of work was creating
something new in the labor force. Leisure time. People were
working shifts instead of tending to a farm which operates
essentially twenty four hours a day, and because shift work
(05:39):
was predictable, so was free time.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
As much as people were working and working many hours
and working very hard, they did have the means and
the hours available to go out and have genuine leisure opportunities.
In many ways, for the first time at a mass level,
they were able to read.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
And read they did, and now, thanks to Peter Callier,
they had something to reach that could make them what
Charles Elliott called a cultivated man. The Harvard Classics.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Following on the great success of these mass subscription magazines,
people like Peter Collier said, why can't we do this
for a book series. It would be the same model,
the same demographic, and people would love to grasp the
opportunity to get a genuine liberal education.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Charles Elliott accepted Callier's challenge, and upon Elliott's retirement, he,
along with several professors from Harvard, began selecting works that
were worthy of inclusion in the five foot bookshelf. They
agreed that a fifty volume collection would be suitable, and
in May of nineteen oh nine, immediately following Elliott's retirement
from Harvard, the work began. The list of works included
(06:40):
that covered over twenty three thousand pages is too long
to do justice to, but you can guess some of
the authors Plato, Cicero, John Milton, Saint Augustine, Walt Woodman, Shakespeare,
in so many others. The marketing in the Harvard Classics
was genius, and Charles Elliott's renowned was central to this marketing.
He made several public statements like this one to advertise
(07:02):
the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Within the limits of fifty volumes containing about twenty three
thousand pages, My task was to provide the means of
obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed
essential to the twentieth century idea of a cultivated man, and.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
The visual presentation of the Harvard Classics was in genius
as well. Upon its release, three distinct bindings were printed.
A limited first edition run of twenty thousand copies included
Charles Elliott's watermark signature on every page. The edition was
known as the Deluxe Edition. Other limited editions of the
Harvard Classics were marketed afterwards. There was the Elliott Edition,
(07:41):
signed by Charles Elliott and limited to one thousand sets,
and the Alumni Edition Deluxe. For the record, it isn't
clear what made this edition alumni or deluxe, but to
the buyers it surely felt like a luxury. Many editions
were published in Crimson colored binding, and as everyone knew,
the color Crimson meant Harvard, and the Harvard Seal was
printed on the binding, so visitors to the house of
(08:03):
an owner of the Classics could immediately identify the collection.
Most importantly, there was an eager audience for this series.
City dwellers were eager to improve themselves, and the Harvard
Classics promised the reader entrance into the status of the
cultivated man. In the first two decades of the Harvard
Classics publishing, over three hundred and fifty thousand full sets
(08:23):
were sold, and countless more were sold as Colliers continued
to publish various editions until nineteen seventy. You can still
find sets in American households today. I grew up in
a house with a full set on display. And where
did we display it? Ironically, in a five foot bookshelf
in our bathroom. I'll let you insert your own joke there.
But in the meantime, here again is doctor Robert Johnston
(08:45):
on the significance of the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
There's this idea that you can't have democracy without an
educated citizenry, and I think there's actually much to that.
To have a functioning, good, working, truly democratic society, you
need to have people who were well educated at a
very mass level. A series like the Harvard Classics were
crucial to that.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
My family set of the Harvard Classics was recently donated
to a local high school, and given the clear educational
goals of doctor Elliot's five foot bookshelf, this seemed like
a pretty appropriate place for the Harvard Classics to be displayed.
You can still find complete sets online in pretty good condition.
So if you have an empty five foot shelf and
an available fifteen minutes a day, maybe you want to
(09:28):
get yourself a set of the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for some terrific storytelling.
And if you're lucky enough to be in his school, well,
John's a history teacher in a public school system in Illinois,
and my goodness, if we had more history teachers like this,
history would actually be interesting. And what a story to
tell about doctor Charles Elliott and the shift from colleges
as theology schools and divinity schools to classic liberal arts
(09:55):
schools and now well, whatever your opinion to what they
are now, and goodnes to have read these classics and
have them in one space and sell three hundred and
fifty thousand of them complete series showed you the truth
of the appetite for these strivers. It wasn't just about money,
and it wasn't just about a home. It was about
culture too, and this leisure time to be able to
(10:17):
read that the twentieth century brought well to everybody, farmers well,
who had the time work, work, work, and the idea
that we had this kind of time one of the
great great advances in world history. The story of doctor
Charles Elliott, the story of the Harvard Classics, and so
much more here on our American stories
And we're back with our American stories. And now we've
been you one of our favorite contributors and producers, John Elfner,
to tell us the story of the iconic book collection
known as the Harvard Classics, created by a president of
Harvard from the eighteen hundreds because of his unusual philosophy
on education.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
In the early nineteen hundreds, a man named Charles Elliott
made this.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Bold claim one could get a first class education from
a shelf of books five feet law.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
That claim might strike some as surprising, but what is
even more surprising is that this man, Charles Elliot, was
president of Harvard University, a position he held for nearly
forty years. It seems odd that the president of America's
most prestigious university would say you don't need a school
to become educated. But if you know a little more
about Charles Elliott and the United States at the turn
of the century, this statement makes more sense. During the
(01:06):
early nineteen hundreds, the United States was experiencing rapid transformation.
The American Industrial Revolution created loads of factory jobs, which
were luring farmers from rural America and immigrants from across
the ocean to American cities.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
The population of the cities was skyrocketing during this period.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That's doctor Robert Johnston. He's a history professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's an expert on
this period.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
The social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century in the United States were among the most momentous
in our nation's history. People came from all over the
globe so that they could have better lives for themselves
and for their children.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Of course, they were drawn to America to improve their
economic circumstances. But for many there was more to it
than that.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
We might call these people strivers, people who really sought
to improve themselves in what we think of as a
classic American way.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
The desire of these drivers to improve themselves was recognized
by members of America's established elite class, and none was
more elite than doctor Charles Elliott, the longest serving president
of Harvard University. You heard Elliott's clim at the beginning
of the story about the possibility of an education minus
a university, and that was no hollow claim from Elliott.
He had spent his last four decades as Harvard's president
(02:21):
transforming the institution from its original mission as a minister's
training school to become a leading liberal arts college. As
Elliott was nearing retirement, he began to consider how his
transformation of Harvard could be shared more broadly with those
who couldn't attend a university.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Of course, the problem was that still very few people
could go to college, not just Harvard, but any college.
And so what would you do if you want to
create an opportunity for everyone?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Elliott saw the nation's emerging striver class and began speaking
to them on their terms. What if he imagined the
classics taught at Harvard could be made more widely available,
especially to those who couldn't afford to take four years
off of work to attend a university. Central to that
vision was his belief in the power of the written
word to educate anyone. I'm telling you, this guy loved books,
(03:09):
and he believed books, not teachers, were the surest path
to becoming educated.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. They
are the most successible and wisest of counselors, and the
most patient of teachers.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
He even began to share in public addresses his belief
that a university may not be necessary to become what
he called a cultivated man.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
A three foot shelf would hold books enough to afford
a good substitute for a liberal education to anyone who
would read them with devotion, even if he could spare
but fifteen minutes a day for reading.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Fifteen minutes a day, that's all it would take. And
doctor Elliott's bookshelf was the right idea at the right time.
There was a public appetite for something like this. Here again,
is doctor Robert Johnston.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
Part of thinking of better lives, of capturing the American
dream was not just about making money and buying a
better house, but in fact becoming cultured. And to do
that people realized that they wanted to be educated in
a very broad and liberal way.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Elliott later amended his estimation of the size of the
bookshelf to five feet, and his frequent references to this
idea earned it the name doctor Elliott's five foot bookshelf.
But it's not clear that this idea was anything Elliot
ever intended to actually create. Sure, it was consistent with
his ideas about the value of liberal arts education, but
for Elliott, this five foot bookshelf idea seems to have
(04:33):
been more of a rhetorical flourish than an actual intention,
And it was an easy claim to make, since he
likely assumed he'd never have to test the ability of
his bookshelf to educate. That was until Peter Collier, one
of the nation's biggest publishers, heard Elliott make this claim
in his speech and said to Elliott, Oh, yeah, prove it.
Peter Collier was the publisher of Collier's magazine. Colliers built
(04:57):
itself as a weekly collection of fact, fiction, sensation, in wit, humor,
and news. The magazine featured prominent writers including Jack London,
upt In Sinclair, and the creator of Sherlock Homes, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, and the public aided up. Colliers was
first published in eighteen eighty eight, and by eighteen ninety
two it was going to a quarter of a million
homes in America. By the time Charles Elliott was publicly
(05:19):
ruminating about his five foot bookshelf, that number had grown
to half a million. And why was there such a
large audience for a magazine like Colliers at this time?
It was because the changing nature of work was creating
something new in the labor force. Leisure time. People were
working shifts instead of tending to a farm which operates
essentially twenty four hours a day, and because shift work
(05:39):
was predictable, so was free time.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
As much as people were working and working many hours
and working very hard, they did have the means and
the hours available to go out and have genuine leisure opportunities.
In many ways, for the first time at a mass level,
they were able to read.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
And read they did, and now, thanks to Peter Callier,
they had something to reach that could make them what
Charles Elliott called a cultivated man. The Harvard Classics.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Following on the great success of these mass subscription magazines,
people like Peter Collier said, why can't we do this
for a book series. It would be the same model,
the same demographic, and people would love to grasp the
opportunity to get a genuine liberal education.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Charles Elliott accepted Callier's challenge, and upon Elliott's retirement, he,
along with several professors from Harvard, began selecting works that
were worthy of inclusion in the five foot bookshelf. They
agreed that a fifty volume collection would be suitable, and
in May of nineteen oh nine, immediately following Elliott's retirement
from Harvard, the work began. The list of works included
(06:40):
that covered over twenty three thousand pages is too long
to do justice to, but you can guess some of
the authors Plato, Cicero, John Milton, Saint Augustine, Walt Woodman, Shakespeare,
in so many others. The marketing in the Harvard Classics
was genius, and Charles Elliott's renowned was central to this marketing.
He made several public statements like this one to advertise
(07:02):
the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Within the limits of fifty volumes containing about twenty three
thousand pages, My task was to provide the means of
obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed
essential to the twentieth century idea of a cultivated man, and.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
The visual presentation of the Harvard Classics was in genius
as well. Upon its release, three distinct bindings were printed.
A limited first edition run of twenty thousand copies included
Charles Elliott's watermark signature on every page. The edition was
known as the Deluxe Edition. Other limited editions of the
Harvard Classics were marketed afterwards. There was the Elliott Edition,
(07:41):
signed by Charles Elliott and limited to one thousand sets,
and the Alumni Edition Deluxe. For the record, it isn't
clear what made this edition alumni or deluxe, but to
the buyers it surely felt like a luxury. Many editions
were published in Crimson colored binding, and as everyone knew,
the color Crimson meant Harvard, and the Harvard Seal was
printed on the binding, so visitors to the house of
(08:03):
an owner of the Classics could immediately identify the collection.
Most importantly, there was an eager audience for this series.
City dwellers were eager to improve themselves, and the Harvard
Classics promised the reader entrance into the status of the
cultivated man. In the first two decades of the Harvard
Classics publishing, over three hundred and fifty thousand full sets
(08:23):
were sold, and countless more were sold as Colliers continued
to publish various editions until nineteen seventy. You can still
find sets in American households today. I grew up in
a house with a full set on display. And where
did we display it? Ironically, in a five foot bookshelf
in our bathroom. I'll let you insert your own joke there.
But in the meantime, here again is doctor Robert Johnston
(08:45):
on the significance of the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
There's this idea that you can't have democracy without an
educated citizenry, and I think there's actually much to that.
To have a functioning, good, working, truly democratic society, you
need to have people who were well educated at a
very mass level. A series like the Harvard Classics were
crucial to that.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
My family set of the Harvard Classics was recently donated
to a local high school, and given the clear educational
goals of doctor Elliot's five foot bookshelf, this seemed like
a pretty appropriate place for the Harvard Classics to be displayed.
You can still find complete sets online in pretty good condition.
So if you have an empty five foot shelf and
an available fifteen minutes a day, maybe you want to
(09:28):
get yourself a set of the Harvard Classics.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for some terrific storytelling.
And if you're lucky enough to be in his school, well,
John's a history teacher in a public school system in Illinois,
and my goodness, if we had more history teachers like this,
history would actually be interesting. And what a story to
tell about doctor Charles Elliott and the shift from colleges
as theology schools and divinity schools to classic liberal arts
(09:55):
schools and now well, whatever your opinion to what they
are now, and goodnes to have read these classics and
have them in one space and sell three hundred and
fifty thousand of them complete series showed you the truth
of the appetite for these strivers. It wasn't just about money,
and it wasn't just about a home. It was about
culture too, and this leisure time to be able to
(10:17):
read that the twentieth century brought well to everybody, farmers well,
who had the time work, work, work, and the idea
that we had this kind of time one of the
great great advances in world history. The story of doctor
Charles Elliott, the story of the Harvard Classics, and so
much more here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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