Thank you for this! I have the older, original set and was curious as to what the differences were. This was a lovely video indicating the changes in translators and additional material from the 20th century that I may want to add to my list of future reading.

@greatbooksbigideas

15 күн бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks for a great overview! I’d love a physical set, incredible how they managed to fit such huge books like Middlemarch, War & Peace etc in! They’re hard to get here though in Ireland, so I went the digital way, Internet Archive has downloadable pdfs (and epub, but they’re bad), so at least I can highlight and take notes. It’s the first edition though, so seeing this was great to fill in the blanks! 😊

@greatbooksbigideas

14 күн бұрын

Thanks! Yes, I've heard from a few overseas viewers who say that these sets weren't widely available. I guess it was mostly an American venture. I want to do a video soon talking about the format of the books. Opinions vary a lot on that. It IS incredible how much shelf space is saved! Cheers.

First women authors took this long to join the club?! Madness:)

Quite a few of the additions to the 1990 set are in the yearbooks (The Great Ideas Today) They range from 1961 to 1998. Like the sets, the older years are easier to get your hands on, but if you buy online there is a good chance they will send you the wrong year. The good news is that the yearbooks sell for very cheap and it is not too much of a loss if you get a wrong year. I almost have a full set. Each of the volumes starts with a discussion on some kind of social issue, sometimes still relevant, sometimes dated, and sometimes comically dated. Then they do a broad overview of science, literature, philosophy, etc for the year, once again ranging from still relevant to comically dated. After that there is some kind of article about one of the Great Books or their writers. Finally there are several additions of the Great Books.

@greatbooksbigideas

10 күн бұрын

Thanks for the info! Yes, I have a complete set of The Great Ideas Today, and they're terrific. I'll be covering them on the channel soon.

I have the original set that you have, I bought it back in 2009 off someone online, I have seen a new set of the second edition on eBay selling for 1500.00. I would love to acquire it but I would probably end up divorced since I have over 2000 books in my library and my wife is fed up with so many books😳

@greatbooksbigideas

14 күн бұрын

I got very lucky with the 2nd edition set about 12 years ago. Found a 90% complete set on craigslist for $80. It took a few years and a lot of patience to acquire the missing volumes from eBay, Amazon, ABEbooks at decent price points. Who knows, you might get lucky too! One option that might keep your wife happy is to just fill in selected volumes from the 2nd edition. Thanks for the comment!