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By Root 1033 0

Great Books can be had in inexpensive reprints, and almost all the rest can be bought for less than the five dollars a volume they cost in this set. This presents a dilemma: Those who are truly interested in books probably already have most of these, while those who don’t may be presumed not to be ardent readers, and not in a mood to spend two hundred and fifty dollars. Even when need and desire coincide, as in the case of young bookworms (if such there still are), it is more fun—and cheaper—to buy the books separately. Not only that, but sets, especially of different authors, are monotonous and depressing; books, like people, look better out of uniform. It bothers me to see Tristram Shandy dressed like the Summa Theologica. Milton should be tall and dignified, with wide margins; Montaigne smaller, graceful, intimate; Adam Smith clear and prosaic; and so on. Mr. Rudolph Ruzicka has done his best, by varying the type faces and the title pages, to give variety and distinction to the set. In this respect, and in the binding, he has made a vast advance over the Harvard Classics (no great feat). But he has put nearly everything into double columns, which I find text-bookish and uninviting. (Even the Classics are not double-column.) This was doubtless necessary for the lengthier books, but such slim volumes as Homer, Dante, Hegel, Bacon, and Rabelais get the same treatment. Rabelais looks particularly grotesque in this textbook format. There is, however, one work in the set to which double columns are admirably suited: Dr. Adler’s Syntopicon.

With this formidable production I shall now grapple. I have already pointed out that insofar as the set has a raison d’être, the Syntopicon is it. It is, however, a poor substitute for an introductory apparatus. According to Dr. Adler, “this gargantuan enterprise” represents “about 400,000 man-hours of reading...over seventy years of continuous reading, day and night, seven days a week, week in and week out from birth on.” Since he did not start reading at birth and is not seventy, he had to call in some help; the Syntopicon is “the product of more than one hundred scholars working for seven years,” which is to say that a hundred scholars worked on it at one time or another during the seven years of preparation. (The staff fluctuated between twenty and fifty people.)

The first step was to select not some Great Ideas but The Great Ideas. A list of seven hundred was whittled down to a hundred and two, extending from Angel to World and including Art, Beauty, Being, Democracy, Good and Evil, Justice, Logic, Man, Medicine, Prudence, Same and Other, Theology, and Wisdom.[2] These were broken down into 2,987 “topics,” the top sergeants in this ideological army, the link between the company commanders (the hundred and two Great Ideas) and the privates (the 163,000 page references to the Great Books). Thus the references under “Art” are arranged under twelve topics, such as “3. Art as imitation,” “7a. Art as a source of pleasure or delight,” “8. Art and emotion: expression, purgation, sublimation.” With Dr. Adler as field marshal, coach, and supreme arbiter, the “scholars” (bright young graduate students who needed to pick up a little dough on the side and latched on to this latter-day W.P.A.) dissected the Great Ideas out of the Great Books and, like mail clerks, distributed the fragments among the topical pigeonholes, the upshot being that, in theory, every passage on “Art as a source of pleasure or delight” in the Great Books from Homer to Freud ended up in “Art 7a.” Finally, Dr. Adler has prefaced the references under each Great Idea with a syntopical essay that summarizes the Great Conversation of the Great Writers about it and that reads like the Minutes of the Preceding Meeting as recorded by a remarkably matter-of-fact secretary.

The Syntopicon, writes Dr. Adler, is “a unified reference library in the realm of thought and opinion,” and he compares it to a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Words and facts, however, can be so ordered because they are definite, concrete, distinguishable entities,