Okay, these should come standard with every house:

[jsbowden]

And I'm serious.

http://www.lifewisdom.com/gb.desc.html

I think when E is a little older maybe.

Also, it's fire alarm testing day. It seems it takes a fire marshall five fucking hours to verify that the strobe lights and alarm bells on a single floor that was just built out work. It's amazing; I can verify this for our entire floor in under 10 minutes. I've done it this morning, just to see how long it took. It's really fucking hard to get anything done when the fire alarm is going off at times for random lengths of time. And what happens if we actually have a fire? We've been instructed by building management to ignore the alarms, since they will be going off for testing. This shit should be required to be done when the building is fucking empty.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

As for the books, I instinctively think that uniform sets like that are super-cool, and totally want them in the same way that I want the many-volume full OED, and the Vance Integral Edition.

But in this case, I'm a little wary, because when it comes to classic books like that, there are important details beyond the works themselves. For instance, they have Homer -- but what translations? Some old public-domain thing, or are they springing for a good modern translation? Translation issues apply to all the non-English books, but even the English ones: Do they have useful footnotes? Are they carefully produced from accurate texts, or are they just slap-dash copies of some random edition? I'd rather read this edition of Thucydides than a random public-domain one, even if it would look cool on my shelf.

Given how much Brittania emphasizes the breadth and scope of the collection, and how little they talk about the quality of the particular editions (beside their admittedly attractive appearance), I'm inclined to believe that this is meant to look impressive on the shelf, rather than be actually read.

But I'd still take a set if somebody gave it to me.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

And kinda confirming my suspicions: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/excat/ideas5.html

Reaction to the Great Books of the Western World upon publication was, in the main, politely respectful. But one voice loudly cried foul. In a New Yorker review that Adler called a "hatchet job," Dwight Macdonald referred to the set as a "fetish of The Great" and accused its producers of being "a typical expression of the American advertising psyche." "The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project," he lamented, "is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible." To Hutchins' claim that the set of books represented a liberal education upon which the fate of the country and the world depended, Macdonald responded: "Madison Avenue cant" and "poppycock." He concluded, "the problem is not placing these already available books in people's hands but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that."

Macdonald was reacting to the physical format (with two columns of dense, encyclopedia-sized type the set earned the reputation for being virtually unreadable), but he was also reacting to the inferior translations selected. The editorial board saved money by selecting only texts in the public domain, even purposefully overlooking excellent recent translations of Greek texts by University of Chicago faculty members. Homer is presented in prose form, and most of the translations date from the nineteenth century. In a telling sign of the times, no one seriously questioned the texts selected--even Macdonald had no real complaint. Years later, when the second edition appeared, it was greeted with scorn for its lack of inclusiveness.

Initially the Great Books of the Western World sold poorly. In the first year it sold 1,863 copies (500 to the original subscribers), then a mere 138 sets in 1953. It looked as though the $2,000,000 expended would never be recouped, but in 1956 Encyclopaedia Britannica hired Kenneth M. Harden to manage sales. A long-time encyclopedia salesman who knew the value of a "foot in the door," Harden understood the hard sell. He marketed the set door-to-door with a simple installment plan ($10 down and $10 a month) and used premiums such as a free Bible and bookshelf to entice would-be buyers. Backed by colorful brochures, posters, and magazine advertisements, he reached the mass market to sell over 50,000 copies in 1961. In 1964, William Benton reminded his staff that, "for 196 years, the man with the foot in the door has been the great source of our company's strength," then effortlessly blending culture with commerce, he applauded his staff for their role as educational leaders "in a world hungering above all else" for "an education of which the Great Books is a supreme symbol." The Great Books of the Western World was a financial disaster until it was sold as Hutchins feared it would be--by door-to-door salesmen touting "culture" to an insecure American middle class.