quote:

FOR $249.50, which is (for all practical purposes) $250, one could buy, in 1952, a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in other ways from Homer to Dr. Mortimer J. Adler,
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Rhoades' Virgil and Cookson's Aeschylus are in verse, but they are dull and mediocre, the former smoothly so and the latter clumsily so. Charles Eliot Norton's prose Dante is unbelievably graceless ("In my imagination appeared the vestige of the pitilessness of her who . . ." "While I was going on, my eyes were encountered by one, and I said straightway thus . . ."). Jebb's Sophocles and E. P. Coleridge's Euripides are in that fantastic nineteenthcentury translator's prose ("Yon man . . . Ay me! And once again, Ay mel" "Why weepest thou? Thus stands the matter, be well assured." "In fear of what woe fore shown?").
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[On the "syntopicon," an index of topics for the Great Books:] This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler's 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader's mental compartmentation doesn't correspond to Dr. Adler's, either. Furthermore, one needs the patience of Job and the leisure of Sardanapalus to plow through the plethora of references.