I’d been considering getting a copy of The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, but then I noticed that they’re all printed on cheap, non-acid-free paper. That’s not good. As commenters on Amazon note, even if you were a speed reader the books would be falling apart before you managed to read them all.
Today though during slow parts of a work conference call my RSS feed pointed me at an article on The Economist site. And there was an advertisement there for The Folio Society. Beyond being amazed to actually find a possibly useful ad on a web page, they seem like they put out quality books. It could take a long time to build up a solid collection of classics, but it’s not like I’d have the time to read them faster than a sporadic subscription would provide. I’d also considered seeing if Powell’s has any sort of a service where I could give them a list of a few hundred classic books and have them watch for an in-reasonable-condition-and-quality-paper-slash-binding older printing to filter through their stores…seems like the type of value-add that could help a book store’s business unless they don’t have a well computerized inventory and it becomes and expensive, manual-labor-intensive task.
I still like the idea of simply having “all the classics” on a book shelf to just grab and start reading when the random whim hits me. Maybe I just need to go to the library more often?