Augie March used them to climb out of poverty. Malcolm X did time with them in prison. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby bantered about them in MGM’s High Society. Assembled one hundred years ago by the longtime president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, the Harvard Classics are a set of great books, ranging fromPlato to Dante to Darwin, that were designed to educate working-class adults in an era when only 3 percent of Americans were college graduates. Dr. Eliot’s “Five-Foot Shelf” went on to sell millions of volumes and became a cultural landmark.

Charles W. Eliot, educational reformer and long-time Harvard president, was fond of remarking that a five-foot shelf could holdenough books to substitute for a good liberal education. As Eliot approached retirement, P.F. Collier & Son Publishers invited him to compile fifty volumes, each between 400 and 450 pages, to fill that shelf. Eliot quickly accepted, and the firstvolume appeared early in 1909. Known colloquially as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," the Harvard Classics became a topic of intense discussion in both literary circles andthe mainstream press. An editor's introduction and a reader's guide rounded out the project in early 1910, and Collier's began selling complete fifty-one volume sets. By the time of Eliot's death in 1926, they had sold almost 300,000 of them, amounting to more than 14 million individual volumes. Subsequent sets of Eliot's recommended fiction and "Junior Classics" also sold well.

On the BBC, Professor John Mullen and Christopher Beha discuss whether the Five Foot Shelf is still relevant. Listen here.

top left: Charles Eliot, from Volume 50, Introduction Reader's Guide Indexes; above: Thomas Huxley, from Volume 28, Essays English and American.