For better than all books are the truths which books contain, and to condense those truths into a form that makes them available is not only to invest them with new powers and an enlarged range of usefulness, but is also not necessarily to interfere with any of those essential qualities that make up the exquisite literary flavor of a fine original.

The selections in the world’s greatest books have been collected, and are alphabetically arranged, in ten different divisions,—­namely, Fiction, Lives and Letters, History, Religion, Philosophy, Economics, Science, Poetry and Drama, Travel and Adventure and Miscellaneous Literature.

An important additional feature of the work is the brief, yet highly critical biographical and bibliographical note which accompanies every author and every selection throughout the twenty volumes.  To this must be also added the not less important Introductories, and other explanations written by experts, which often accompany the selections in the text—­cardinal examples of which will be found in particular in the section of Religion of this work, in the articles dealing with such subjects as the Book of the Dead, Brahmanism, Confucianism, the Koran, Talmud, etc.

With respect to the selections themselves, it may be added that, even where they are derived from foreign originals, they have often been prepared from those originals rather than from any existing translations of them, as in the fine translation of Catullus by Professor Wight Duff, or the condensations from Euripides, Corneille, Kant, Tacitus, and very many more.  In other cases, again, the selections have been specially prepared for the world’s greatest books by their authors or their agents, such as the two selections by Major Martin Hume in History, by Dr. Bramwell and Sir Francis Galton in Science, by Mr. Robert Hichens in Fiction, etc.  From this, and still more from the list of authors itself, it will be found, we hope, that besides a completely modern aim, a distinctly proper proportion of modern literature has found a place in the work, and that the best of French, German, Scandinavian, Russian, and other authors take rank in it with American and English, as do the best of the ancients with the best among the moderns.

As the aim of the world’s greatest books has been directed first of all towards those forms of literature which were in the most need of condensation to make them readily available, it will not be expected that the Poetry section of the work will contain the shorter kind of poems.  Moreover, even if the shortness of such poems and their general accessibility in present-day anthologies did not render their inclusion here a work of supererogation, it was felt that their place could be far better filled in a work like the present by the world’s best dramatic literature,—­as has been done.  This does not apply, however, to translations from the shorter poems of ancient classical literature, which, however short they may be, cannot be said to be already generally available for everyday reading.