A Really Old Cross-Promotion

At first I thought it was just a cool old crate:


But then the words sank in and I realized it once held books... and that it had something to do with (I inferred) Collier's.

The titular Dr. Eliot was Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard. According to Wikipedia, when Eliot gave speeches, he would often say that all of the important aspects of a liberal education could be gained by reading books that fit on a five-foot (or sometimes three-foot) shelf. The Collier Corporation saw that as a sales opportunity and challenged him to come up with the list of titles, and then they published the 51 volumes.

I'm not sure how many boxes the set came in; 51 books would not have fit into just this box. The Classics appear to have been Eliot's retirement project, since he retired from a lengthy presidency around the same time the books appeared in 1909. Oh, and he worked with an English professor (William Neilson) to devise the list; Eliot himself was a mathematician and chemist.

Eliot sounds like quite a person, who had a profound effect on Harvard as we knew it in the 20th century. As a 19th-century son of privilege, he had his problems from my 21st-century point of view, of course. For instance, though he was good on whether Harvard should be open to black, Catholic, and Jewish men, he was also considered the "greatest union-hater in the country" and opposed the education of women (though it's not clear from the Wikipedia entry if that means he opposed Harvard educating women or the general idea of educating women).

The books are now available as PDFs, so now you (and I) have no excuse but to be liberally educated, at least as that state would have been conceived by a Boston Brahmin in 1909.