Product Description

The Everyman’s Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the world’s greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everyman’s Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors’ lives and works.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

The Aeneid by Virgil
The Analects by Confucius
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy
The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carried Away by Alice Munro
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler
Collected Stories by Roald Dahl
Collected Stories by Franz Kafka
Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike
The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov
The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dubliners by James Joyce
Essays by George Orwell
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Histories by Herodotus
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
The Iliad by Homer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Odyssey by Homer
Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Republic by Plato
Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan
Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Ulysses by James Joyce
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everyman’s Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everyman’s Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #384919 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-24
• Released on: 2006-10-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 100
• Binding: Hardcover

Amazon.com Review
Everyman's Library celebrates over 100 years of publishing with the Everyman's Library 100 Essentials Set including one hundred bestselling titles from their distinguished catalog (from Austen to Atwood, Dante to Dostoyevsky). Each beautifully bound hardcover book features decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The History
Everyman's Library was founded in 1906 by London publisher Joseph Malaby Dent with the purpose of publishing literature that would appeal "to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman." Everyman's Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors' lives and works.
In 1991 Everyman's Library was relaunched by a small independent company with the support of Random House in the UK and Alfred A. Knopf in the US. The revived library featured a fine, easy-to-read typographic design, sewn cloth bindings, acid-free paper, silk ribbon-markers, and substantial new introductions and chronologies by leading scholars and writers. Pride and Prejudice was the first of fifty titles to be published in September 1991, and within twelve months 130 titles had appeared, including such major twentieth-century classics as Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Trial, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, none of which had previously been published in Everyman's Library. By the 100th Anniversary in 2006 the list of authors Everyman's Library publishes has been joined by Achebe, Allende, Penelope Fitzgerald, Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Nabokov, Rushdie, Updike, and Waugh, a catalog that few publishers can rival in paperback and of course none in hardcover.


Quality
Everyman's Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

Everyman's 100 Essential Titles (Included in This Set)

Heart of Darkness

Great Expectations

To the Lighthouse

Walden

Beloved

Crime and Punishment

Carried Away

A Tale of Two Cities

1984

The Handmaid's Tale

Browse all 100 titles included in this set

My Everyman's: Authors Choose Their Favorites

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Everyman's Library in 2006, we asked contemporary authors to choose the book they'd most like to own from the collection. Check out their picks below--and some very interesting reasons why they chose them!

John Updike on Nabokov's Pnin

Its installments in The New Yorker were my first acquaintance with Nabokov's prose, and I was bowled over. It remains in my mind the warmest of his fictions, and the only one originally in English which gives a picture of the pain and embarrassments of his exile in this country.

---

Jane Hamilton on Don Quixote

Don Quixote! When I was in High School my boyfriend's goal in life was to play Don Quixote in Man of Lamancha. This was something I could not understand. To want to play a lunatic, to have your hair spray-painted white, to not even get to kiss the girl? Even after he performed the part so nobly our junior year I secretly thought the play, a celebration of psychosis, was dumb. But the book! Half of the world's greatest aphorisms were written by Cervantes. I am a shallow person and I know this from reading Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. It's high time to read the book.

---

Mark Danielewski on Shakespeare's Tragedies, Volume 1

I want them all. Camus, Chandler, Cervantes.
Aeschylus, Dante, Conrad. Updike, Homer, Joyce. Morrison, Mann, Orwell. Rushdie, Virgil, Twain. García Márquez, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald. Kafka, Woolf, Plato. The Bible, The Koran, Tolstoy. And you want me to pick one? Torture, I tell you. Choice's promising blade.

Grumble.
Tantrum.
Sigh.

Then I'll choose the one that fed me when I was hungry and calmed me when I ached, what I carried around Europe as a penniless & pretty much friendless college kid, nearly twenty years ago, thumbing over and over through that worn paperback to find a company of voices I still won't forget: William Shakespeare, Tragedies, Volume 1.

---

Mary Gaitskill on Nabokov's Lolita

It is impossible on the level of brief comment to rise to the level required by the book. But if I can go ahead and be clumsy about it, I chose it because of the way Nakokov addresses the multi-faced nature of passion and longing, and how quickly one face transforms into another, the intimate relationship between ugliness and beauty, and how close the seeds of life and death sit together in the pod. And how fascinating and exquisite the pod is just on its own. The book is deep and lightning swift at once.

---

Customer Reviews

Why?
I agree with those who have expressed their affection and respect for Everyman. I have been purchasing Everyman editions for over forty years. When I started, the imprint was defunct and only second hand editions were available. Some years back, the imprint was revived, and a flow of excellently produced, affordable hardcover editions became available again, (though not in the same small, pocket-sized format as the original Everymans).

BUT: is this collection a good idea? If you want to fill up the bookshelves in a new house, maybe. But realistically, how many of these books do you really want to own, and how many (of those you don't already have) will you really read in the next five or ten years?

I have looked through the selection of books, and it's certainly a strange group of books. For myself, I already own about two thirds of the titles, and have little interest in the other third. I would venture to guess that few readers would be that interested in enough of these books they don't already have to make the purchase of the set a good economic value. (Which isn't to say they wouldn't be a good decorative element, but that's not what my review is about.)

If what you want is to own a lot of classic texts, you might be better off with one of the Penguin Classics libraries. Yes, they're paperback rather than hardbound, but you can replace those paperbacks you want to read again with hardbacks and still save money. And the Penguin editions usually have more notes and supplementary material than the Everyman editions.

If what you want is a library of the great writings of Western civilization, you can get the Great Books of the Western World series for less money than the Everyman set, and have enough great reading to last you for two or more lifetimes. (Plus, if what you want is an impressive looking bookshelf, GBWW is the set for you!)

Basically, then, while the Everyman books are wonderful books for serious readers, and I am grateful to Knopf for resurrecting the imprint, I think most readers would be better off going down the list and purchasing individually the titles the actually intend to read than they would be purchasing the whole set.

Instant Library
The thing I like most about this set is the quality of the books themselves. I'm a reader who can't stand newspaper quality paper in a book - or flimsy covers. The Everyman set is top notch. The paper is smooth and the bindings are beautiful. Additionally, each book includes a ribbon marker - nice touch.

Regarding the titles, here are the top works of literature from the western world, and some form the east. The list of books says it all.

Yes, there are a number of authors missing who I'd like to see here - Oscar Wilde, Augustine, HG Wells, Jack London, RL Stevenson. Even so, there are a number of great titles here.

Let's see, one book a week, and that's... two years of reading! Start with the best and move to the rest... :)

indespensible
There are many reasons to own this set. That the volumes in it are smaller than the original editions is a plus, not a minus. If you want a pocket book, then get the Penguins. These Everyman's are beautifully bound, beautifully printed, light and and compact; I love the way they fit the hands. A set of them is for reading, not for decoration. I've found that having them actually encourages me to read. Out of sight is out of mind, but these are always here to say, "Read me!" I own The Great Books, and they are not nearly as readable. They are bulky, the paper stock thin and the print tiny.

Unless you are one of those who outsource their kid's education, reserving to themselves the teaching of such life essentials as shopping and television, your home library will be the core of the family's culture and learning. I've found a sriking difference between the kids of people who keep a big bookcase and kids of those who don't.

The titles offered are a wonderul survey of world literature, weighted to the modern. Yes, I am glad there's no Jane Austin here. No, I'm not glad to see some politically correct selections. But making a big issue of some inclusions and omissions is just vanity. Only stupid people say they will never read a certain book. Smart people will put books before them, for example by buying sets.

No, don't buy them piecemeal. Buy a whole set, either this one or the smaller Contemporary Classics set, plus, for the kids, the Children's Classics set. And, to round out, a set of the Harvard Classics, which are amazingly complimentary, with little duplication. Yes, it's an expense, but it's also an investment of a lifetime. And a legacy.