[EP] Easton Press’s 100 Greatest Books Ever Written
Easton Press’s 100 Greatest Books Ever Written [EP]
Originally published in the 1970s
The Easton Press publishes those leather-bound instant collectables with gilded page edges and satin bookmarks. We had nearly a full set in my house growing up. This, along with the list I got from an English teacher in high school [MUM], were my first introduction to the canon. When my mother died from cancer in 2005 , she left me the family’s collection of Easton Press classics. I set about reading every one of them in her memory.
The Easton Press is a publishing house and so it is restricted in what it can publish—and what it thinks it can make a profit on. That makes for a quirky “Greatest Books Ever Written” list, which combines safe, out-of-copyright classics like Austen and Dickens with some populist entries. (The books that only got one vote are old adventure tales by Scott, Verne, and London.) However, the Easton Press’s list deserves kudos since it is open in its definition of what a book is. There are poetry collections, plays, novels, and short stories to be found here. The title “100 Greatest Books Ever Written” is also a misnomer since the current list is 125 books long, with those additions brought in several years ago to fill out some holes.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift
- Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
- A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
- A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Candide by Voltaire
- Oedipus The King by Sophocles
- The Hunchback Of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
- The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
- The Sea Wolf by Jack London
- Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Collected Poems by Robert Browning
- The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Collected Poems by John Keats
- On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Collected Poems by Robert Frost
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
- Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
- Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- The Iliad by Homer
- Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
- Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
- The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
- Beowulf
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Neclace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
- Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
- Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The History of Early Rome by Livy
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
- Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
- The Red And The Black by Stendhal
- A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickins
- The Republic by Plato
- Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
- Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
- Silas Marner by George Eliot
- The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Billy Budd by Herman Melville
- The Confessions by St. Augustine
- Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
- The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
- The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
- Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
- Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Alhambra by Washington Irving
- Plays by Aristophanes
- Confessions by Jean Rousseau
- Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
- Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
- Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
- Plays by Aeschylus
- Plays by Henrik Ibsen
- Symposium by Plato
- Holy Bible
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Comedies by Shakespeare
- Tragedies by Shakespeare
- Histories by Shakespeare
- Plays by Euripides
- Essayes by Sir Francis Bacon
- Two Plays for Puritans by George Bernard Shaw
- Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- Short Stories of Oscar Wilde
- Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Short Stories of Charles Dickens
- Two Plays by Moliere
Where can I find the kist of 125. There used to be an entry for it on wikpedia, but I guess the “parent basement dwellers” that they have for editors deleted it.
Rudy, here you are http://www.leatherboundtreasure.com/greatest_books_ever_written.html
Forgot to say THANKS. Better late than never?
Hi, I have several first edition’s of the 100 greatest books reserved by The Easton Press and wanted to find out their value. If you could help that would be helpful. Thank you, Dyanna Thomas