Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of Books
The Harvard Classics, fifteen minutes a day
In 1916 the publisher of the Harvard Classics first printed a little guide with a reading for every day of the year, each a few pages from one of the fifty volumes, with a short introduction to draw you in. Here are all 366 readings, the full text of each day’s pages from the volumes, so you can read along whether or not you own the set.
Today’s reading
Harvard Classics · fifteen minutes a day October 26
Franklin Learned the Secret
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Poor at twenty, rich at forty, internationally famous at fifty. Benjamin Franklin once walked the streets of Philadelphia alone, poor, and with no education. Yet he rose to be a leader because he learned the secret of careful reading.
What the Five Foot Shelf is
Charles W. Eliot was president of Harvard for forty years, from 1869 to 1909. He liked to say that a shelf of books about five feet long could hold a liberal education. When he retired, the publisher P. F. Collier & Son took him at his word. With William Allan Neilson, a Harvard professor of English, Eliot chose the works, and Collier printed them in 1909 and 1910 as The Harvard Classics: fifty volumes, from Plato, the Bible and the Greek plays to Shakespeare, Franklin, Darwin and the founding documents of the United States. A volume of lectures on the set followed in 1914.
Eliot’s plan
Eliot believed that anyone who read these books with care, even for only fifteen minutes a day, could gain the essentials of a liberal education. The guide, Fifteen Minutes a Day: The Reading Guide, turns that promise into a calendar. Each day has a few pages, often tied to the date by a birthday or an anniversary, and a short introduction meant to make you want to read on. In a year you sample nearly the whole shelf: history, poetry, philosophy, science, travel, scripture and drama, a little at a time.
How to use the daily readings
- Today’s reading follows the date on your own phone or computer, wherever you are.
- The calendar has every day of the year, so you can catch up, read ahead or start on any day you like.
- Each day opens with the guide’s introduction, then the reading itself, set like a book page: verse stays verse, and the footnotes come at the end.
- When the guide’s pages begin or end in the middle of a paragraph, the reading runs on to the end of it, and a small note says so.
- Each day names its volume and pages and links to the scanned page, so you can follow along in your own set or check a word.
- The day pages print cleanly, one reading to a few sheets of paper.
- Your browser remembers the last reading you finished (on this device only), so this page can show you where to pick up.
The edition used
The daily plan is from Fifteen Minutes a Day: The Reading Guide (P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1930), scanned at the Internet Archive. The texts are from The Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W. Eliot (P. F. Collier & Son, copyright 1909–1910), in a later printing from the original plates scanned at the Internet Archive; the guide’s page numbers match it. Some printings reset a few volumes, so in another set the page numbers may differ. Both the guide and the volumes are in the public domain in the United States. 1930 edition of the Reading Guide; texts from the 1909–10 Harvard Classics as printed in the volumes scanned.
Every day’s text has been proofread line by line against the page images.
The fifty volumes
What’s in each volume, how many of the daily readings come from it, and which days they are.
Volume 1: His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin; The Journal of John Woolman; Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
8 readings · the scan
Volume 2: The Apology, Phaedo and Crito of Plato; The Golden Sayings of Epictetus; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
8 readings · the scan
Volume 3: Essays, Civil and Moral, and The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon; Areopagitica and Tractate on Education, by John Milton; Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
6 readings · the scan
Volume 4: The Complete Poems of John Milton
6 readings · the scan
Volume 5: Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 readings · the scan
Volume 6: Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
8 readings · the scan
Volume 7: The Confessions of Saint Augustine; The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
5 readings · the scan
Volume 8: Nine Greek Dramas: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes
6 readings · the scan
Volume 9: Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny
5 readings · the scan
Volume 10: The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
5 readings · the scan
Volume 11: The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
5 readings · the scan
Volume 12: Plutarch’s Lives
10 readings · the scan
Volume 13: The Aeneid of Virgil
7 readings · the scan
Volume 14: Don Quixote, Part I, by Miguel de Cervantes
6 readings · the scan
Volume 15: The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan; The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
7 readings · the scan
Volume 16: Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
8 readings · the scan
Volume 17: Fables, by Aesop; Household Stories, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
8 readings · the scan
Volume 18: Modern English Drama: Dryden, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shelley, Browning, Byron
8 readings · the scan
Volume 19: Faust, Part I, Egmont, and Hermann and Dorothea, by Goethe; Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
6 readings · the scan
Volume 20: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
5 readings · the scan
Volume 21: I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni
4 readings · the scan
Volume 22: The Odyssey of Homer
6 readings · the scan
Volume 23: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
7 readings · the scan
Volume 24: On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, and A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
6 readings · the scan
Volume 25: Autobiography and On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill; Characteristics, Inaugural Address and Essay on Scott, by Thomas Carlyle
7 readings · the scan
Volume 26: Continental Drama: Calderón, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Lessing, Schiller
6 readings · the scan
Volume 27: English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
12 readings · the scan
Volume 28: Essays, English and American
9 readings · the scan
Volume 29: The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
9 readings · the scan
Volume 30: Scientific Papers: Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology (Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newcomb, Geikie)
5 readings · the scan
Volume 31: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
6 readings · the scan
Volume 32: Literary and Philosophical Essays: Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Lessing, Schiller, Kant, Mazzini
9 readings · the scan
Volume 33: Voyages and Travels, Ancient and Modern
12 readings · the scan
Volume 34: French and English Philosophers: Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes
9 readings · the scan
Volume 35: Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed
10 readings · the scan
Volume 36: The Prince, by Machiavelli; The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More; The Ninety-Five Theses and other writings of Martin Luther
6 readings · the scan
Volume 37: Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Some Thoughts Concerning Education; Three Dialogues; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
7 readings · the scan
Volume 38: Scientific Papers: Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology (Harvey, Jenner, Holmes, Lister, Pasteur, Lyell and others)
8 readings · the scan
Volume 39: Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books
6 readings · the scan
Volume 40: English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
7 readings · the scan
Volume 41: English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
12 readings · the scan
Volume 42: English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
17 readings · the scan
Volume 43: American Historical Documents, 1000–1904
15 readings · the scan
Volume 44: Sacred Writings, Part I: Confucian, Hebrew, Christian
7 readings · the scan
Volume 45: Sacred Writings, Part II: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Mohammedan
7 readings · the scan
Volume 46: Elizabethan Drama I: Marlowe, Shakespeare (Edward the Second, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest)
9 readings · the scan
Volume 47: Elizabethan Drama II: Dekker, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger
5 readings · the scan
Volume 48: Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
4 readings · the scan
Volume 49: Epic and Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
5 readings · the scan
Volume 50: Introduction, Reader’s Guide, Indexes
0 readings · the scan
On my shelf
I have the whole set at home, all fifty volumes plus the Lectures, and it’s listed with the other sets in the Library. For more great books in order, try the reading paths, or find free copies of other classics on Free Books.