The Harvard Library - Prof Eliot's 5-foot bookshelf

The Harvard Library

The publisher P F Collier and Son over 100 years ago asked the president of Harvard to build a list of books he recommended to provide an overview of Western civilization. His list was 50 volumes - some of which are one book; others are two or three works. It is known as Prof Eliot's 5-foot bookshelf of 1910. Later Prof Eliot also did a series of fiction - seventeen volumes. (Though the original list contains some fiction.)

In print: they sold thousands of copies. Used sets are always available at Ebay.

Online - Prof Eliot’s five-foot library at Open Cultures is the overview. They lead to the following four online sources for the full set.

Eliott's FULL texts, the scanned originals are at Archive.org

• Archive.org

Internet Archive is actually at archive.org. It has the full set in plain text, Epub, Kindle, PDF for download and html (for online reading)… and some I am not familiar with.

• Harvard Classics at Internet Archive

At Project Gutenberg. They have four formats: plain text, Epub, Kindle for download and html (for online)

• H C at Gutenberg

And Bartleby has the full set in html for online reading:

• H C at Bartleby

I learned about this in Weekly Standard magazine.