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Throughout my childhood, my family owned two sets of the Harvard Classics. The first belonged to my father, an amateur book collector, and sat untouched in our library at home. The second lived at the home of my maternal grandmother, where it was nestled incongruously among Agatha Christie novels and the works of modern Catholic writers like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

As I grew older and became more passionate about literature, I returned frequently to my grandmother's shelves. I often read Eliot's introduction to the series, which is the shortest and least forbidding text in the set. In it, he writes:

I hope that many readers who are obliged to give eight or ten hours a day to the labors through which they earn their livelihood will use The Harvard Classics, and particularly those whose early education was cut short, and who must therefore reach the standing of a cultivated man or woman through the pleasurable devotion of a few minutes a day through many years to the reading of good literature.

It struck me at the time I first read these words as exceedingly unlikely that many people had ever used these books in this way. Then one day I brought up the Shelf in a family conversation, and my mother mentioned almost in passing that my grandmother, who left school after eighth grade, had educated herself by reading from the Five Foot Shelf after each day's work in the garment district in lower Manhattan.

My grandmother died when I was young, and I had never before heard about this time in her life. As I pushed my mother and my aunts to tell me more, I began to form a new image of this woman. These books, which she'd read in just the way that Eliot had hoped, took on a new significance for me. I saw in them an opportunity to connect to someone who was gone before I ever really knew her. Eliot's project, long a curiosity to me, I saw now as noble, and it led me to read more about the man himself.

For fifty years, Charles Eliot was among the most famous men in America, and among the most famous Americans in the world. As president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, he played a decisive role in the creation of the modern American university. Nonetheless, if you aren't a professional educator or a Harvard graduate (I am neither), Eliot is likely known to you these days by way of his Five Foot Shelf. Or not at all.

As I learned about Eliot, I thought about the declining role of the public intellectual in American life, and about the kind of celebrity that has replaced it. Something else occurred to me as well, as I passed again over the titles contained in the Classics. If my grandmother had indeed read through all fifty-one volumes, then she had a far better grasp of literature and culture as a young woman with little formal education than did her grandson, an Ivy League English major with literary ambitions. These thoughts led to others, about cultural heritage and the canon and books as a link to the dead and about all sorts of poignantly antiquated notions like cultivation and pleasurable devotion.

I thought about almost anything, that is, except opening and reading those books. Finally, I decided to do even that. It occured to me that if I could finish about one volume a week, I could complete the set in one year. I resolved to begin volume one on New Year's Day, 2007, and to finish the set by the next New Year's Eve.

The Five Foot Shelf