Abridged Too Far
May 18, 2016 2:53 PM   Subscribe

The World's Greatest Books series (published 1910) was an attempt "to effect a compendium of the world's best literature in a form that shall be at once accessible to every one and still faithful to its originals; or, in other words, it has been sought to allow the original author to tell his own story over again in his own language, but in the shortest possible space." In other other words, this is where you'll find such ludicrous feats of deletion as a David Copperfield running 4,645 words (cooked down from 382,964) or a Clarissa condensed to 0.4% of its original mass.

Volume I: Fiction writers A-B. Includes drastic minifications of works by Austen, Balzac, Behn, and Boccaccio.

Volume II: Fiction writers B-D. Includes Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Bunyan, Cervantes, Chateaubriand, and Collins.

Volume III: Fiction writers D. Includes Defoe, Dickens, Disraeli, and Dumas.

Volume IV: Fiction writers E-G. Includes Edgeworth, Eliot, Fielding, Gaskell, Goethe, and Goldsmith.

Volume V: Fiction writers G-K. Includes Hugo and Johnson.

Volume VI: Fiction writers L-P. Includes Le Fanu, Lytton, Malory, Manzoni.

Volume VII: Fiction writers P-S. Includes Pushkin, Richarson, Rousseau, Sand, Scott.

Volume VIII: Fiction writers S-Z. Includes Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sidney, Smollet, de Staël, Stendhal, Sterne, Stowe, Swift, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Trollope, Turgeneve, Verne, and Zola.

Volume IX: Lives and Letters 1. Includes Héloïse and Abélard, Boswell, Cellini, Cicero, and de Quincey.

Volume X: Lives and Letters 2. Includes Luther, Pepys, Pliny, La Rochefoucauld, Wesley, and Woolman.

Volume XI: Ancient and Mediæval History. Includes Josephus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Holinshed.

Volume XII: Modern History. Includes Prescott, Macaulay, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Carlyle, Taine.

Volume XIII: Religion and Philosophy. Includes Browne, Calvin, Fénelon, Hegel, Newman, Paine, Penn, Pascal, Renan, Swedenborg, Aristotle, Bacon, Berkeley, Descartes.

Volume XIV: Philosophy and Economics. Includes Hume, Kant, Locke, Montaigne, Plato, Schopenhauer, Seneca, Spinoza, Bentham, Burke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Malthus, Marx, Mill, and Smith.

Volume XV: Science. Includes de Buffon, Cuvier, Darwin, Davy, Faraday, Galileo, Harvey, von Humboldt, and Newton.

(Volume XVI not available)

Volume XVII: Poets and Dramatists, G-M. Includes Gogol, Heine, Homer, Horace, Ibsen, Jonson, Juvenal, Longfellow, Lucretius, Marlowe, and Milton.

(Volume XVIII not available)

Volume XIX: Travel and Adventure. Includes Darwin, Hakluyt, Linnaeus, Mandeville, Polo, Sterne, and Voltaire.

Volume XX: Miscellaneous literature and index. Includes Addison, Aesop, Carlyle, Demosthenes, Emerson, Hazlitt, Plutarch, and Thoreau.
posted by Iridic (30 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Reminds me of Masterplots, the series of reference books from the 1940s that summarized the plots of books in a paragraph or so. As a writer, I found Masterplots fascinating, and it was addictive bedtime reading for many months. From what I've breezed through here, I can see that World's Greatest Books could be another guilty pleasure. I mean, there are plenty of authors here I don't recognize, and I will never, in a million years, be likely read their original works. World's Greatest Books appears contemptibly middlebrow at first glance, but I can see the point.
posted by Modest House at 3:06 PM on May 18, 2016 [11 favorites]


Pretty impressive how they were able to replicate the basically-useless AutoSummary feature in Microsoft Word decades before the invention of the microprocessor.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:10 PM on May 18, 2016 [8 favorites]


Oh boy, that Religion & Philosophy volume. The bulk of the "Brahmanism" section is dedicated to proving that the Bhagavad Gita was swiped from the New Testament, which is uh not great, but you have to admire any attempt to reduce the Talmud to fifteen pages.
posted by theodolite at 3:17 PM on May 18, 2016 [6 favorites]


Not as successful as The Simpsons' retellings, eh? Still, regardless of how inutile the outcome, I bet this would be really fun to do.
posted by little onion at 3:28 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


...you have to admire any attempt to reduce the Talmud to fifteen pages.

Pikers
posted by IndigoJones at 3:44 PM on May 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


David Copperfield running 4,645 words

I hope it still has the part where he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.
posted by beerperson at 3:47 PM on May 18, 2016 [13 favorites]


Cliff's Notes, then?
posted by ardgedee at 3:57 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember a piece in National Lampoon about extreme condensing of great works of literature that included this one, for "Moby Dick": "Call me Ishmael. Call me later." I think "Crime and Punishment" went something like: "A guy kills an old lady, then feels guilty about it and turns himself in."
posted by AJaffe at 4:07 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I read the the Tale Of Two Cities one and found it kind of incoherent. Which more or less aligns with my recollection of reading it in school, 10/10 top abridger, would recommend.
posted by rodlymight at 4:23 PM on May 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


The Count of Monte Cristo's abridgment spans seven years of Dantè's life in 726 words.

On one hand it does contain the classic sentence "The sea is the cemetery of the Château d'If!" On the other hand, it contains this paragraph:
"The last Count of Spada made me his heir," said the abbé. "The treasure now amounts to nearly thirteen millions of money!"
posted by infinitewindow at 4:34 PM on May 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Hegel

*boggles*
posted by praemunire at 4:41 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter: nearly thirteen millions of money!
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:19 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


proust?
posted by pyramid termite at 5:20 PM on May 18, 2016


An ex-boyfriend showed me a book he had purchased that had one-page summaries of great works, specifically designed for uh bathroom reading. He was really excited about it. The only lingering question is: why did it take me another year to jettison him?
posted by janey47 at 5:56 PM on May 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


...you have to admire any attempt to reduce the Talmud to fifteen pages.


No big deal. It expands the moment you try to discuss its contents.
posted by ocschwar at 6:11 PM on May 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


Bravo on the post title!
posted by aws17576 at 6:16 PM on May 18, 2016 [12 favorites]


My mom had a bookcase shelf full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. It was really weird reading them. You could sort of tell something was missing, but you weren't exactly sure what, or where it was missing from. But, it all just felt slightly...soulless.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:32 PM on May 18, 2016


Still 4,645 words too many.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 7:34 PM on May 18, 2016


proust?

To be fair, you could fit the actual plot of Proust on a napkin. Or so I believe, being deep in vol. 5.
posted by praemunire at 8:11 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Picnic, lightning, pedophilia.
posted by benzenedream at 8:49 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


VE
posted by clavdivs at 10:05 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Call me Ishmael. Call me later."

We're on the ocean
The ship is sailing
Homoerotic
Adventures whaling

One legged Captain's
Obsessed and crazy
But here's my coffin
So call me Ishmael
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:48 PM on May 18, 2016 [9 favorites]


To be fair, you could fit the actual plot of Proust on a napkin. Or so I believe, being deep in vol. 5.

Gerard Genette's winning entry in the 'Summarize Proust Competition':
Marcel becomes a writer.
posted by Phersu at 1:31 AM on May 19, 2016


Does anyone who actually enjoys reading see the point of this? When I find a book I like, I don't want it to end.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:27 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Probably so people can say to others and themselves that they've read a great work, without feeling like they're totally lying.

I do like to read plot summaries of (usually trashy) books that I know I'm never going to read, just to see how, from a mechanical standpoint, the structure is laid out. It's the same with movie spoilers.
posted by picea at 5:14 AM on May 19, 2016


Pfft, amateurs. Book-A-Minute is old enough to vote (with web design to match!) is pares it down way further than that.
posted by Mayor West at 5:34 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Gerard Genette's winning entry in the 'Summarize Proust Competition':
Marcel becomes a writer.


Dammit, you've spoiled me. No point in even finishing now.
posted by praemunire at 8:38 AM on May 19, 2016


For a while in the late 70's and early 80's my parents subscribed to Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which was a similar concept, although without the pretense of capturing great literature. I don't remember them actually reading those volumes. I think maybe they just wanted to class up our home a bit. You know, with cut-rate abridgements of popular mass market novels.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:35 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Marcel becomes a writer.

I'd add the clause "on the way, he's kind of a jerk to Albertine."
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:30 PM on May 19, 2016


And I say that as someone who enjoys Proust, and would recommend it to any serious reader.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:31 PM on May 19, 2016


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