The second box of The Great Books of the Western World arrived before 7 AM this morning. They are all unboxed and added to the shelves where I made space for them. I decided not to put them up on top of the bookcase, because I don't want my cats walking on them. Sorry, Annals of America and Cambridge Modern History.
This set is spotless. With the exception of volume 15 (Tacitus), which they told me was missing, it is a like-new 1952 first-printing set. Pages are not yellowed, spines are not broken. There are no cardboard pockets for check-out cards, so this must have been a "Reference Desk" set. The Tacitus volume I bought on Abe Books to replace the missing one was checked out. It has a pocket with a card in it, and a number tag on the spine for shelving. Luckily, its pages are also clean and unmarked. It is also a volume from the 1952 first printing, and was last checked out in June, 1978.
This set is so pristine that I think I'm going to avoid writing in it. At least at first. I'll make my notes on cards as I read and then translate them to my vault. This will give me the opportunity to model that process, since it's an important one. We don't always get to own the books we learn from, so it's important to develop an effective system for getting the information and insights we need out of books we can't deface.
I'm excited to get started with my Great Books program! I'll begin with reviews of the brief description of the Syntopicon in volume 2 and the more detailed one in the Appendix in volume 3. Then I think I'll do a syntopical reading of the "History" topic, following its links, commenting, and adding my own (after all, a lot has happened in History since 1952!). If that seems fun and useful, maybe I'll follow some other syntopical trails. I'm not sure whether the next step will be to follow the reading course the editors suggested, or to begin at the beginning. In any case, that'll be a decent-sized chunk of the content I'll be making for Lifelong Learners going forward. So subscribe, tell your friends, and enjoy the ride!
Second Unboxing!