Posted on 01/25/2009 5:37:13 PM PST by Yanni.Znaio
Some years ago, I subscribed to an "on approval" book club called The Classics Club, originally published by Walter J. Black in the 1940s.
I've got over thirty of the titles, and have found a number of others, but have never been able to locate a complete list of titles for this series.
I AM SEEKING THIS INFORMATION AND WOULD LIKE TO COMPLETE THIS COLLECTION AS LONG AS THE NUMBER OF VOLUMES IS REASONABLY FINITE.
Alas, Walter J. Black went out of business in the 1980s.
Here is the list of titles and authors that I either have or have confirmed are in the series:
Own? | Title | Author |
true | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
false | Autobiography | Benjamin Franklin |
true | Discourses | Epictetus |
true | Essays and New Atlantis | Francis Bacon |
true | Essays, Poems, Addresses | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
true | Fathers and Sons | Turgenev |
true | Five Great Dialogues | Plato |
true | Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift |
true | Henry Esmond | Thackeray |
false | Lives of the Saints | |
true | Meditations | Marcus Aurelius |
true | Old Goriot | Balzac |
true | On Man In The Universe | Aristotle |
true | On Politics And Education | John Locke |
true | On The Nature Of Things | Lucretius |
true | Paradise Lost and Other Poems | John Milton |
false | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
false | Progress and Poverty | Henry George |
false | Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
true | Selected Essays | Montaigne |
true | Selected Lives And Essays | Plutarch |
false | Selected Plays | Henrik Ibsen |
true | Selected Poems | Horace |
true | Selected Poems | Walt Whitman |
true | Selected Poems | Robert Browning |
false | Selected Tales and Poems | Edgar Allan Poe |
true | Selected Works | Cicero |
true | Thaïs/Sylvestre Bonnard | Anatole France |
true | The Beginnings of Modern Science | Boynton |
false | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer |
true | The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. I, Comedies | William Shakespeare |
true | The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. II, Histories | William Shakespeare |
true | The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Vol. III, Tragedies | William Shakespeare |
false | The Golden Treasury | Palgrave |
true | The History of Plymouth | William Bradford |
true | The Iliad | Homer |
true | The Law of War and Peace | Hugo Grotius |
true | The Odyssey | Homer |
true | The Praise of Folly | Erasmus |
false | The Rubiyat | Omar Khayyam |
true | The Way of All Flesh | Samuel Butler |
true | Two Years Before The Mast | Richard Henry Dana |
true | Utopia | Sir Thomas More |
true | Walden | Henry David Thoreau |
Please add a few of Dostoyevksy's greatest works: The Brothers Karamazov, House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment
And plays: Aeschylus' The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Orestiade;
Sophocles: Antigone; Oedipus the king; Oedipus of Colonnus;
Euripides: Bacchae, Medea, Trojan Women.
There are no classics without these "fathers" of narrative
This is a series of books sold by mail.
I have some of them but not all and I cannot find a complete listing of them.
Check the link in post #5 for a picture and description of “The Classics Club”.
These Freepers have book-related lists.
You left off the blanks. How do we fill them in?
If you know of titles that were in Walter J. Black’s series “The Classics Club” that I have not listed, just post them here, and I’ll go to my blog and update the post I made about it.
Spelling of “Rubaiyat” needs to be fixed. You already had every CC title I know, but I don’t have a complete list.
bookmark
See Post #7, but thanks.
Cool.
Feel free to use the ones I’ve found; I will update the page on my blog as new titles are sent to me.
On second thought, I’m thinking of the Harvard Classics series. Still, it should have been one of them; I can’t imagine a serious collection of classics without it.
I don’t know of any official lists that would be in complete agreement with each other; but I can’t imagine a good list without Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on it.
See #7, #22 for clarification.
Thanks.
No Bronte?
I haven’t found evidence of Bronte as a volume in this set; however that does not exclude the possibility that it is.
Amazon has a 19 volume set:
http://www.amazon.com/Published-Meditations-Prejudice-Dialogues-Montaigne/dp/B001O4KKXS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=miscellaneous&qid=1233010415&sr=8-2
Thank you.
They’re all on my list.
I asked, and got an answer from, the Library of Congress:
Your question sent to the Rare Book & Special Collections Division has been forwarded to the Humanities and Social Sciences Division for reply. Although we have examined numerous print and online sources, we have not identified a complete list of the titles in the series “The Classics Club” published by Walter J. Black.
When we searched our Online Catalog for the phrase “Classics Club,” there were records for 33 titles published by Walter J. Black during the years 1941-1953.
WorldCat resulted in a list of 69 book titles when we searched “classics club” as a keyword with “black” as the publisher. We have not read the full list so it is possible that there may be duplicate titles in the list on WorldCat. You probably have access to WorldCat at a public library in your city.
The Bookman’s Answer: Useful Information for Book People includes “The Classics Club Checklist” (with 33 titles) at:
< http://www.bookmansanswer.com/2008/07/classics-club-was-popular-book-club-in.html >
According to the obituary for Mr. Black (published in the New York Times of April 17,1958) 60 titles were selected for this series by a panel of judges. The NYT article does not list any of the titles, and we do not know if all 60 titles (or more) were published.
A search of the New York Times in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, one of our subscription databases, yields citations to advertisements for Classics Club titles (but not a complete listing) from March 19, 1944 to February 18, 1968. We also found other articles about the publishing company and about Walter Black’s son who later became president of the company founded by his father.
You may have access to the database ProQuest Historical Newspapers at a research library in your area. If you like, we could send you printouts of the articles and a few of the advertisements.
You indicate that you have already done a good bit of web research so that you may already have found the same information that we have described above. Please let us know if you would like for us to send any printouts.
Reference Librarian, Main Reading Room
Humanities and Social Sciences Division
Library of Congress
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