There Were Giants Among Books in Those Days

The first Modern Library Giant that I bought and read was William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. It was a couple of grades above my reading level at the time, but I remember liking its descriptions of Mexican scenery, and of course, being a normally bloodthirsty American boy, I was engrossed by its description of Cortes’ destruction of the Aztec empire.

The next Modern Library Giant that I bought was Don Quixote, with illustrations by Gustave Doré. I didn’t read Don Quixote until years later, but I spent hours looking at the Doré illustrations, which to this day make me incapable of enjoying any others.

I continued to acquire titles in this noble series. I have the Modern Library Giants for the complete works of Lewis Carroll and for the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Mann. I just bought the Giant that includes the essays of Charles Lamb. Someone recently gave me the complete works of Keats and Shelly, in one Giant.

I will go to my grave not having read everything in my Modern Library Giants, but I do take them up from time to time. There are excellent to have around.

Used Giants — that’s all there are anymore — cost between $20 and $25 dollars. This brings Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in three volumes, within the reach of modest book-buying budgets.

How did such a good thing as Modern Library Giants come to be?

Modern Library Giants are descendants of books published by the firm of Boni and Liveright, starting in 1917. The intention of this firm was to provide the American self-educating public with affordable high quality reprints of the classics, along the lines of the British series Everyman Books. In 1925, Bennet Cerf and an associate bought out Boni and Liveright and founded the Modern Library Company.

In 1931, Cerf decided to publish War and Peace under the Modern Library imprint, but the book was too long for the Modern Library format. So Cerf created the Modern Library Giants line.

Cerf then founded a subsidiary of the Modern Library Company to reprint some of its titles, chosen more or less at random, in more expensive bindings. The subsidiary was accordingly named Random House. This subsidiary did so well that it became the controlling imprint in 1936.

The Modern Library Company continued to publish books until 1970. Until that melancholy moment, it kept true to its original purpose, to provide inexpensive but high quality versions of great books.

Unfortunately, copies of Modern Library books have become collectible, which is driving up the prices of individual volumes. This can only thwart the intentions of Boni, Liveright, and Cerf. Collectors of Giants are to be encouraged whenever possible to consider the joys of collecting glass telephone pole insulators instead.

But who is to say that the noble intentions of Boni, Liveright, and Cerf are no longer bearing fruit? Somewhere in this broad land there is a boy or girl, lonely and bored and without playmates, who will turn on a rainy afternoon to the parental bookshelf and perhaps will pull down the first Modern Library Giant in a set of three and begin to read therein the sonorous words of Edward Gibbon:

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

And perhaps that boy or girl, enthralled by the panorama of history set before them by Gibbon in unforgettable periodic prose, will resolve to become an historian. And who is to say that they will not become a great one?