[1][2] Eliot believed that a careful reading of the series and following the eleven reading plans included in Volume 50 would offer a reader, in the comfort of the home, the benefits of a liberal education, entertainment and counsel of history's greatest creative minds.

The collection was enhanced when the Lectures on The Harvard Classics was added in 1914 and Fifteen Minutes a Day - The Reading Guide in 1916.

[7] The Lectures on The Harvard Classics was edited by Willam A. Neilson, who had assisted Eliot in the selection and design of the works in Volumes 1–49.

Collier & Son consistently marketed the Harvard Classics as 50 volumes plus Lectures and a Daily Reading Guide.

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.

The best acquisition of a cultivated man is a liberal frame of mind or way of thinking; but there must be added to that possession acquaintance with the prodigious store of recorded discoveries, experiences, and reflections which humanity in its intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization has acquired and laid up.The idea of the Harvard Classics was presented in speeches by then President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University.

[1] Several years prior to 1909, Eliot gave a speech in which he remarked that a three-foot shelf would be sufficient to hold enough books to give a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion.

After many attempts to support his initial claim, he decided that the shelf would need to be lengthened to five feet - but a definitive list of works was not declared.

The proposal, presented to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, was unanimously approved as a useful undertaking from an educational point of view.

Eliot retired as President of Harvard University in May 1909 and devoted much of the next year to organizing the 50 volumes and selecting the list of included works.

[7] An advertisement for The Harvard Classics appeared in Collier's on April 30, 1909, stating the "Complete Official Contents Now Ready.

Collier & Son announced it would publish a series of books selected by Eliot, without disclosing the list of included works, that would be approximately five feet in length and would supply the readers a liberal education.

Eliot describes his goal in helping publish The Harvard Classics as motivated by an educational purpose and he explains why the English Bible was not selected.

[7] Most advertisements encouraged an interest notice be mailed back to the publisher offering a targeted and highly successful marketing campaign for the series.

The intent by the publisher was to offer The Harvard Classics as a subscription with only some of the volumes being sent initially and the remaining to follow in subsequent shipment.

Collier's copyrighted Volume 50 was in 1910, the Lectures on The Harvard Classics in 1914,[15] and Fifteen Minutes a Day - The Reading Guide in 1916.

[7] Each was appealing to buyers for the elaborate illustrations, frontispieces, plates, portraits, facsimiles, and crimson silk page markers (features unlikely to be found in later printings).

[6] The colophon found on the ultimate page of content of first editions notes these sets were "planned and designed by William Patten" (the Book Manager at P.F.

Four different sets in full morocco leather were printed with raised bands, Harvard University insignia, and volume names in gilt lettering on the spines.

[7] The third type of binding of the first editions of The Harvard Classics were printed in fine buckram (green and crimson).

The green buckram has gilt lettering with crimson and gold Harvard insignia on both the spine and front board.

In 1910, Collier began printing The Harvard Classics in a limited quantity set called the Renaissance edition.

Variations of the Cambridge edition were printed for over a decade in cloth over hardboards and later (after 1919) in an imitation leather binding material called fabrikoid.

The set has an embossed symbol used in many of the education materials developed by the Eliot Foundation on the front board with Versitas Scientia Humanitas (trans.

Lastly, the publishing company marketed a larger size of books with the Home Library edition.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in 1972 against Crowell Collier for deceptive selling practices of The Harvard Classics.

[19] In a statement responding to the complaint, Crowell Collier stated that it no longer sells The Harvard Classics.

[2] The Five-Foot Shelf, with its introductions, notes, guides to reading, and exhaustive indexes, may claim to constitute a reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.The main function of the collection should be to develop and foster in many thousands of people a taste for serious reading of the highest quality, outside of The Harvard Classics as well as within them.Eliot and Neilson concluded that the 50 volumes were "so far as possible, entire works or complete segments of the world's written legacies" for English speaking readers.

Items were selected for inclusion by Charles W. Eliot, with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson.

Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March mentions a singed copy of "Dr. Eliot's five-foot shelf," several times throughout.