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Comment by noam87 | Hacker News Reader

I have this great collection from 1901 "World's Best Essays" -- 9 tomes. Everything from Seneca to Adam Smith.

It's sad how much knowledge and social/ethical advancement is being forgotten. Our schools and universities are failing society. We're just going to keep making the same mistakes.

Edit: 10 volumes.

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It's not being forgotten. It was never widely known to begin with. Intellectual elites still know it, and if anything they've probably been growing relative to the entire population.

I feel like at best one could argue that those elites have less influence on the deciders of the world (at least those that are not part of them).

This beast? https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001438712

Any recommendations?

All nine volumes :)

There appears to be ten of them?

All 10 volumes free of HathiTrust's walled garden (i.e., available as full PDF downloads without having to be a member of a "partner institution"):

in zsh:

  for i in {01..10}; do curl -LO https://archive.org/download/worldsbestessays${i}brew/worldsbestessays${i}brew.pdf; done

This is valid bash too.

(If you don't know, you're probably running bash.)

In PowerShell:

    1..10 |%{ $s = 'worldsbestessays{0:d2}brew' -f $_; iwr "https://archive.org/download/$s/$s.pdf" -O "$s.pdf" }

    (% -> ForEach-Object; -f -> string format operator; iwr -> Invoke-WebRequest; -O -> -OutputFile parameter)

Is there a kindle friendly version?

Look on the right side of the above links

It was hard to find so thought I'd share. First go to the full-screen page, then click the "about this book" icon ("i" within a circle). There are links to the following: PDF Plain Text DAISY ePub Send to Kindle

Based on the "Full Text", it looks like they used an automatic OCR to obtain the text from the PDFs, so they are full of many spelling and formatting mistakes. I prefer to get the B/W pdf and split it into files that are small enough not to lag on the Kindle hardware (I have the 2nd generation).

It's always been there and is pretty heavily subsidized - it's good enough stuff that the actual intelligentsia ( as opposed to .. tourists like myself ) considers it a critical resource. It doesn't cost that much to preserve, either. What do you think the old guys at, say, Cambridge study? You see the odd Classics scholar on BookTv now and again, and it's ( for me ) riveting stuff.

It's just that mass culture has blown up so big so fast - driven by technological change - that it seems to get smaller.

It doesn't help that the Stoics were explicitly targeted by the Christians early in the Christianized Byzantine Roman Empire. You can see this in action in YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens debating various Christian thinkers.

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