This was tangibly demonstrated to me as I made my way through the first volume of the set I purchased. Much like encyclopedias (or a full set of the Church Fathers, or Eliot’s “five foot shelf of books,” or Britannica’s “Great Books” series), the Durants were displayed side by side more often than they were read cover to cover. In the same way that encyclopedias served as a marker of middle class respectability and by their very presence signified an educated household – a function wonderfully discussed in The Hidden Injuries of Class by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett – the full set of the Durants, ranged neatly on a shelf, testified to the learning and sophistication of the household in which they were proudly displayed. To have them was to have at one’s fingertips a whole field of understanding – a comforting suggestion of general command in an era of increasing intellectual specialization.įor many, simply possessing these books was assurance enough.

Wells’s wildly popular Outline of History. Though Rubin focuses on Will Durant’s solo production, The Story of Philosophy, her observations about the success of that work generally hold true for The Story of Civilization. These single-volume or multi-volume combinations of command and concision – purportedly comprehensive knowledge, systematically arranged and neatly packaged – provided assurance to their readers that everything they needed to make sense of the world (or some particular aspect of it) could be found within the covers of these books. In her indispensable book The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Joan Shelley Rubin situates the career of Will Durant as illustrative of the craze for the “outline” approach to knowledge, exemplified by H.G.

A motley eleven-volume set of Will and Ariel Durant’s *Story of Civilization*

The story of civilization full set