britannicanet.com » Great Books

Posts Tagged ‘Great Books’

Classic Adler-Van Doren Conversations Discovered

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Thanks to the diligent sleuthing of an Sedona, Arizona, archivist, a series of classic conversations about the art of reading, between the late philosopher Mortimer J. Adler and his acolyte Charles Van Doren, are once again available on video from Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas.

The discussions between the two public intellectuals, produced by Britannica in the 1970s, were lost for many years until they were rediscovered recently by Ken Dzugan, archivist for the Center. They’re now available on a single DVD and may be ordered online at http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm.

Titled “How to Read a Book,” the video was originally produced in conjunction with the third edition of Adler’s classic book of that title, published in 1972 and coauthored by Van Doren. The book’s first edition was a runaway best seller when it was published in 1940.

After going out of print many years ago, the original videotaped product of the Adler-Van Doren conversations disappeared from Britannica’s records. It would have languished in eternal obscurity had it not been for Dzugan’s pluck. After getting a tip from Center member Steve Rossiter, Dzugan searched through an international database of library holdings, located a library that had the original videotapes, borrowed them and approached Britannica, seeking permission to reproduce them. . . .

Read the rest of the story in the press release.

Tags: Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, Charles Van Doren, great, Great Books, How to Read a Book, Ken Dzugan, Max Weismann, Mortimer Adler
Posted in Britannica products | No Comments »

Great Books Going Online

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Coming to a library near you:

Beginning in January of next year, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World will be available electronically, in its entirety, at libraries and institutions. Through an agreement between Britannica and Ingram Digital, the Great Books will be accessible through Ingram’s industry-leading MyiLibrary e-book platform.

The electronic Great Books will contain precisely the same contents as the printed version, with hypertext links from entries in the Syntopicon—the idea index—and the places in the text those entries refer to. The digital corpus will be fully searchable.

If your library doesn’t subscribe, you will have the option of purchasing the electronic version of the Great Books yourself. We’ll have more details when the product becomes available next month.

The Art of Reading
Another new Great Books product we’re delighted to announce is a series of long-lost videos on the art of reading with Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, which will be distributed by the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas.

Adler’s How to Read a Book was an off-the-charts bestseller when first published in 1940. In 1972 he and Van Doren collaborated on the book’s third edition, and a few years later they sat down for several conversations on the book’s main themes. The result was a series of thirteen videos that Britannica issued in the late 1970s.

Somehow, those videos got lost in the sturm and drang of the past three decades, and they would have remained forever so had it not been for the intrepid sleuthing of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which tracked down what may have been the only extant set and made it possible for them to be reissued today on a single DVD.

We’re happy now to work in partnership with the Center to make these intriguing conversations available again. To get more information about the DVD, watch a sample, and place an order, go to:

www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm.

Reposted from the Britannica Blog

Tags: Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, Charles Van Doren, Great Books, Ingram Digital, Mortimer Adler, MyiLibrary
Posted in Britannica Blog | No Comments »

How Now, Great Books? (A Britannica Forum)

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Revisiting (yet again) those classics that refuse to die

In 1948 a panel of distinguished Chicagoans held a symposium on one of Plato’s dialogues on the stage of Orchestra Hall and invited the public to attend. What in the world were they thinking? Plato? The public? Epic fail, you figure, right?

Think again. Every seat in the house was filled, and 1,500 people were turned away.

This odd colloquium was part of Great Books Week in the Windy City, an event the like of which it is hard for us even to imagine today. In those days the classics were hot. Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and all the others who would later be reviled as “dead white men” were for a time there all the rage. Thousands of Great Books reading groups cropped up across America. Celebrities from boxer Gene Tunney to actress Julie Adams (Creature from the Black Lagoon) were caught pawing over the august tomes of Lucretius, Pascal, and Rousseau. The beautiful people jetted out to Colorado for Great Books seminars at the Aspen Institute. Encyclopaedia Britannica published Great Books of the Western World and sold 50,000 copies of the pricey set in one year alone.

And then it ended.

Sales declined, reading groups folded, and everyone, it seemed, went back to watching TV. “The Great Conversation,” as it was called, and as the companion volume (below) to the Great Books is titled, had ended.

What happened? Why did the popularity of the Great Books tank? Or perhaps the proper question is: Why on earth were they so popular in the first place?

Whatever the questions, they’re raised anew by A Great Idea at the Time, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, a book that explores “The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books” with panache and no small measure of vitriol. Here at Britannica we’ve enjoyed this entertaining and highly readable history of the Great Books movement, even if it does direct considerable snark at some of our corporate forbears, notably Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and William Benton.

This week at the Britannica Blog we’ll revisit the Great Books, those works that New Yorker film critic David Denby termed “indestructible” for their ability to survive eternally, despite censorship, intellectual fashion cycles, and putative irrelevance, to continue giving pleasure and enlightenment to many people in every generation.

We’ve invited an assortment of latter-day Great Bookies to discuss the place of the classics in the world today and probe some of the issues about reading and liberal education that linger fifty years after the height of the Great Books “craze,” as the Wall Street Journal recently called it; and fifteen years, give or take, since the so-called “canon wars” of the eighties and nineties ended, more, it seems, from battle fatigue among the combatants than a decisive victory by either side.

Please tune in each day this week to watch the conversation and, as always, take part in it by leaving comments of your own.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]

Tags: Alex Beam, Great Books, Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, William Benton
Posted in Britannica Blog | 1 Comment »