Here is a chance to buy a wonderful gift for yourself or your favorite bibliophile.

I am auctioning off my 50-volume set of the Charles Eliot’s Harvard Classics. It is in good-to-very good condition. Some of the pages are uncut. None of the books are damaged.

The volumes are: (1) Franklin, Woolman, Penn (2) Plato, Epictetus, Marcus, Aurelius (3) Bacon, Milton’s Prose, Thomas Browne (4) Complete Poems in English: Milton (5) Essays and English Traits: Emerson (6) Poems and Songs: Burns (7) Confessions of St. Augustine. Imitation of Christ (8) Nine Greek Dramas (9) Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny (10) Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith (11) Origin of Species: Darwin (12) Plutarch’s Lives (13) Aeneid Virgil (14) Don Quixote Part 1: Cervantes (15)Pilgrim’s Progress. Donne and Herbert. Bunyan, Walton (16) The Thousand and One Nights (17) Folk-Lore and Fable. Aesop, Grimm, Andersen (18) Modern English Drama (19) Faust, Egmont Etc. Doctor Faustus, Goethe, Marlowe (20) The Divine Comedy: Dante (21) I Promessi Sposi, Manzoni (22) The Odyssey: Homer (23) Two Years Before the Mast. Dana (24) On the Sublime French Revolution Etc. Burke (25) Autobiography Etc. Essays and Addresses: J.S. Mill, T. Carlyle (26) Continental Drama (27) English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay (28) Essays. English and American (29) Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin (30) Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newcomb, Geikie (31) Autobiography: Benvenuto, Cellini (32) Literary and Philosophical Essays: Montaigne, Sainte Beuve, Renan, Lessing, Schiller, Kant, Mazzini (33) Voyages and Travels (34) Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes (35) Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed (36) Machiavelli, More, Luther (37) Locke, Berkeley, Hume (38) Harvey, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur (39) Famous Prefaces (40) English Poetry 1: Chaucer to Gray (41) English Poetry 2: Collins to Fitzgerald (42) English Poetry 3: Tennyson to Whitman (43) American Historical Documents (44) Sacred Writings 1 (45) Sacred Writings 2 (46) Elizabethan Drama 1 (47) Elizabethan Drama 2 (48) Thoughts and Minor Works: Pascal (49) Epic and Saga (50) Introduction, Readers Guide, Indexes (–) Lectures.

It is known as the Five Foot Shelf.

It is a first edition, dated 1910. I bought the set about 35 years ago from a bookstore in Philadelphia. Some sets, like this one, have 50 volumes; others have 51 or 52.

I was going to sell it on EBay, but I decided instead that it would be a good fundraiser for the Network for Public Education.

The opening bid is $200.

Here is the way it works. Send your bid to Carol Burris. She will report the highest bid to me each night. I will announce it at 8:30 a.m. each day, and the “auction” will end Friday night. The winner will be announced Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. (anonymously, if you prefer).

The winner will send a check or money order made out to “The Network for Public Education,” along with name and address to Carol Burris. I will pack the books and mail them to the winner.

The winner will get a fabulous set of great classics and the satisfaction of helping a good cause.

Send your bid to Carol Burris at:

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

If you win, send your check to her at:

The Network for Public Education
PO BOX 150266
Kew Gardens, NY 11415-0266

If you want to make a donation to the Network, please send it to this address.