Slashdot Mirror
Free Books on CD?
FosterSJC asks: "I go to St. John's College, Annapolis, home of the Great Books Program, for almost 70 years. This neoclassical method of education was developed and instituted in the late '30s by Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. We have a set syllabus that every student reads in a set order of the course of his/her four years at the college - all primary sources and in all subjects, Lab, Math, Language, Music, and Seminar. Taking a hint, partially, from the OSS CD thread a few weeks back, and this thread, I would like any and all advice about compiling a CD to give to freshman, and anyone else for that matter, containing as many of the Great Books as possible. Since most all are in the public domain (very few 20th century authors), the trick would be finding them, sorting them, organizing them, and making sure you have the highest quality translations as well (the biggest problem with the Public Domain versions of these books). Please help."
Project Gutenberg may well have a lot of the books you want.
And I quote: "The Harvard Classics The Shelf of Fiction Selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD The most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time comprises both the 50-volume "5-foot shelf of books" and the the 20-volume Shelf of Fiction. Together they cover every major literary figure, philosopher, religion, folklore and historical subject through the twentieth century.
NEW YORK: P.F. COLLIER & SON, 1909-1917, NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2001, The Harvard Classics
VOL. I. --- His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin --- Journal, by John Woolman --- Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
II. --- The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato --- The Golden Sayings of Epictetus --- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
III. --- Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon --- Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton --- Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
IV. --- Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton
V. --- Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
VI. --- Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns --- VII. --- The Confessions of Saint Augustine --- The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis --- VIII. --- Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of --- Aeschylus --- Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles --- Hippolytus & The Bacchæ of Euripides --- The Frogs of Aristophanes
IX. --- On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero --- Letters, by Pliny the Younger
X. --- Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
XI. --- The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
XII. --- Lives, by Plutarch
XIII. --- Æneid, by Vergil
XIV. --- Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
XV. --- The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan --- The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
XVI. --- Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
XVII. --- Fables, by Æsop --- Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm --- Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
XVIII. --- All for Love, by John Dryden --- The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan --- She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith --- The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley --- A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, by Robert Browning --- Manfred, by Lord Byron --- XIX. --- Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe --- Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
XX. --- The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
XXI. --- I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
XXII. --- The Odyssey of Homer
XXIII. --- Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
XXIV. --- On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French --- Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
XXV. --- Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill --- Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by --- Thomas Carlyle
XXVI. --- Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca --- Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille --- Phædra, by Jean Racine --- Tartuffe, by Molière --- Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing --- Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
XXVII. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
XXVIII. Essays: English and American
XXIX. The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
XXX. --- Scientific Papers
XXXI. --- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
XXXII. --- Literary and Philosophical Essays
XXXIII. --- Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern
XXXIV. --- Discourse on Method, by René Descartes --- Letters on the English, by Voltaire --- On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard --- Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau --- Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
XXXV. --- The Chronicles of Jean Froissart --- The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory --- A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
XXXVI. --- The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli --- The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper --- Utopia, by Sir Thomas More --- The Ninety-Five Thesis, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning --- Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
XXXVII. --- Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke --- Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics --- and Atheists, by George Berkeley --- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
XXXVIII. --- The Oath of Hippocrates --- Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré --- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey --- The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner --- The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes --- On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister --- Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur --- Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell
XXXIX. --- Prefaces and Prologues
XL. --- English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
XLI. --- English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
XLII. --- English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
XLIII. --- American Historical Documents: 1000-1904
XLIV. --- Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius --- Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes --- Christian I: Luke & Acts
XLV. --- Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns --- Buddhist: Writings --- Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita --- Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran
XLVI. --- Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe --- Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
XLVII. --- The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker --- The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson --- Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher --- The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster --- A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
XLVIII. --- Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
XLIX. --- Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá --- Derga's Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
LI. --- Lectures on the Harvard Classics
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Jowett translations of Plato, for instance, are easily not the top choices of anyone I know who reads Plato seriously. The only exceptions I can think of this are the ancient Greek mathematical works. It is hard to mess up a translation of Euclid, though some of the Univ. Chicago Apollonius and Archimedes texts did manage to screw up the diamgrams.
;)
Pretty much you have two choices for "complete" Great Books sets: the Harvard set, mentioned here, and the Univ. Chicago's Great Books of the Modern World sets.
I attended a Great Books College in southern California (Thomas Aquinas College) and found neither to my liking, but instead spent a small fortune on individual editions. Note to Cliff: Great Books encompasses far more than literature. Philosophy, science, mathematics all have great seminal sources.
Project Gutenberg is as close as the ideal of freely available good English texts gets, but an eclectic choice of web sites, such as Euclid's elements online, also goes a long way toward satieting the desire to know without having to get up from your computer and trot over to your nearest library. Google is the liberally educated man's best friend.
Finally, for those interested in Aquinas in Latin, see www.tacalumni.org/aquinas
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I've compiled a (growing) list of free book sites here:
5
http://www.nosleep.ca/links/view_group.php?id=4
Gutenberg (which has been mentioned) is in there, as well as a few others. I also find it useful, although potentially illegal for you Americans, to search the australian, or canadian archives, as both have a shorter copywright timeline (author's life + 50 years).
Try http://www.blackmask.com Free books a la Gutenberg, even has a CD of books to offer.
The UPenn Online Books Page is an index to a total of more 17,000 online books in various locations. This includes all of the 3000-plus Project Gutenberg texts.
(Note that the Project Gutenberg texts are nice because they're in a completely plain-vanilla ASCII format, each work is in a single file, and the formatting conventions are fairly uniform across the collection).
Oh, don't overlook Project Gutenberg of Australia, as they offer quite a few works from around 1920 to 1950 which are in copyright in the U. S. but not in Australia. Wait, forget I said that.
Pretty impressive: at 17,000 works, the Internet is finally starting to approach the capacity of a (small) physical library. A major university library still is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger, however...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
P.S. I highly recommend this book!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm not only an anonymous coward, I'm lazy as well so I'm not going to check the curriculum, but http://books.mirror.org has links to numerous public domain texts online, many in html format as well as contextual/biographical information about the authors. Maybe it's not strictly what was asked for but it might help.
The Link:
http://burks.bton.ac.uk/