The Great Books of the Western World is an encyclopedic series of books that contains most of what has traditionally been considered the most important books in Western thought. It first came out in 1952 (and was expanded in 1990) and was the brain child of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler at the University of Chicago.

I probably first heard about the Great Books series from my friend Bradley Swanson. He was a big admirer of Adler, whom he often heard interviewed by Milt Rosenberg on his WGN radio show “Extension 720”. Adler was a professor at Chicago and Editor in Chief of the project. Bradley transmitted to me a fascination with the idea of a canon of works that–if you read them closely, discuss them seriously, and think about them deeply–will give you a thorough and profound knowledge of the Great Ideas of the Western world. Including works of philosophy, natural science, history, ethics, religion, poetry, drama, literature, social sciences, psychology, mathematics, politics, and economics, it contains the essential reading for a complete liberal arts education.

I acquired a complete set of the 1990 edition when it was being given away by the ICM at Poynette for lack of use. (Actually, it was missing Volume 54 on Freud, which I subsequently ordered on eBay to complete the set.) For years, I kept it in my classroom, but it didn’t get much more use there than it did in the library. So this summer I finally brought it home with me and found a home for it on a shelf in my basement study.

It it composed of 60 volumes, handsomely bound, numbered, and titled with the authors’ names. Volume 3 starts with the beginning of Western literature: Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Volume 2 continues the Greeks with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanies, and so on. Augustine gets his own volume, and St. Thomas Aquinas gets two, as does Shakespeare. Dante and Chaucer cozy up in volume 19, but Cervantes and Milton get their tomes. Scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Lavoisier, and Heisenberg have their say. Tolstoy gets a whole volume (War and Peace), and Melville and Twain share one. (Somehow they fit both Moby Dick and Huck Finn in one book.) And in what seems like a final sprint to the end, the final volume contains selections from Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, T.S Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald (all of Gatsby), William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and they top it all off with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It seems somewhat fitting to end the entire line of Western literature with a scene where one of the main characters pulls up his trousers and then just stands there doing nothing. Nothing else to do now, I suppose.

The first two volumes make up the Syntopicon, “An Index to the Great Ideas,” which I keep near my desk, separate from the bookshelf across the room where the rest of them are kept. They are divided into broad subjects, alphabetized, each with an introduction followed by an Outline of Topics. #1 is “Angel”; its topics start out like this:

 1. "Inferior deities or demigods in polytheistic religion" [followed by a list of authors, volumes, and page numbers]; 
 2. "The philosophical consideration of pure intelligences, spiritual substances, suprahuman persons"...etc. 

The next big topic is “Animal” followed by Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, and so on.

You have no idea how much I love this part of it. Imagine, instead of having a curious thought and then Googling, or even worse, asking AI to tell you about it, or reading a Wikipedia page, and then going on with your day…imagine instead consulting the Syntopicon with index cards and a stack of beautiful books and comparing the most sublime formulations of thought from authors like Homer, Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe–all on the topic of Angels. One could do worse than spend a day like that.

This is one of the many things I’m excited about doing this summer.