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Article: My decades-long journey of five feet.(The Home Forum)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- September 14, 2000
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This is not about Harry Potter.
But I have a reason for comforting all the young bookworms and consenting adults who've discovered that Harry's latest adventure weighs in at 734 pages, twice as many as "Huckleberry Finn."
I've been living with and not finishing the 22,000 pages of The Harvard Classics for 40 years. Now I'm sitting at a computer about three steps from those 50 volumes edited by Charles W. Eliot. They neatly fill a five-foot shelf as advertised when they came out nine decades ago, a half century before our set was handed down to us.
It all goes back to a remark by Mr. Eliot, then president of Harvard University, who said that "a ...