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• 24 million words
• 517 classics by 130 authors,
• Covers 30 centuries of human thought
• Subject categories: Literature, History, Philosophy, and Science

The ideas, stories, and discoveries that shaped modern civilization …

Information... Knowledge... Understanding... Wisdom...

From the ancient classics to the masterpieces of the 20th century, the Great Books are all the introduction you’ll ever need to the ideas, stories and discoveries that have shaped modern civilization. This collection of 517 classics in 60 beautifully bound volumes is colour-coded into four subject categories: literature, history, philosophy, and science. And since this edition includes works from 20th century authors, it’s the most up-to-date collection of the Great Books ever.

Volume Details

Volumes 1 and 2 of this collection is theSyntopicon, a unique two-volume guide (not sold separately) that enables you to investigate a particular idea and compare what different authors have to say about it. The Syntopicon comprises a new kind of reference work – accomplishing for ideas what the dictionary accomplishes for words and the encyclopaedia accomplishes for facts. Also included is the Great Conversation, featuring fascinating background information, extensive timelines, photos, and quotes from the classic works and their authors.

Colour Coding

Special colours on the Great Books’ spines guide you quickly to the four subject areas

GREEN: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, and Poetry

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Racine, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, Balzac, Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Melville, Twain, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Chekhov, Pirandello, Proust, Cather, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, O’Neill, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Brecht, Hemingway, Orwell, Beckett

RED: Philosophy and Religion

Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barth

BLUE: History, Politics, Economics, and Ethics

Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, J. S. Mill, Boswell, Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Veblen, Tawney, Keynes, Frazer, Weber, Huizinga, Levi-Strauss

GREY: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Newton, Huygens, Lavoisier, Faraday, Darwin, William James, Freud, Poincare, Planck, Whitehead, Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Hardy, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dobzhansky, Waddington