Culture C.O.D.

This culture business needed a big businessman's touch. The University of Chicago thought it was doing well because 6,000 U.S. adults were reading the Great Books in evening study groups. But Businessman Lynn A. Williams Jr., who had caught the itch himself, said flatly, "There ought to be 15 million." Last week he left his job as vice president of the Stewart-Warner Corp. (radios, auto parts) to sell the Great Books to the masses--paperbound, at popular prices. His goal: To make Aristophanes' Birds outsell Betty MacDonald's Egg.

Bookstores in most Midwest cities have been stripped clean of Chicago-blessed classics. By fall, 20,000 adults in 18 cities will be studying the Great Books. To make sure they will have copies to read, the Great Books Foundation (president: Lynn Williams; chairman: Chicago's Chancellor Robert Hutchins) will publish 16 Great Books* by September--for 60-c- a copy, $7.50 a set. The foundation is not trying to steal the thunder of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (chairman: Robert Hutchins). A year from now Britannica will have for sale its own 54-volume, $200-plus edition of all 432 Great Books, expects it to be the biggest thing of its kind since Dr. Eliot's "five foot shelf."

Returning to Chicago after a nine months' leave, 48-year-old Chancellor Hutchins felt "a little dubious" last week: the Boy Wonder (he took over at Chicago at 30) was now an Old Number. He had discovered that he has now been running a university longer than anyone else in the Association of American Universities.

*All or parts of: Plato: Apology, CrIto, Republic; Thucydides: History; Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Birds, Clouds; Aristotle: Ethics, Politics; Plutarch: Lives; St. Augustine: Confessions; St. Thomas: Treatise on Law; Machiavelli: The Prince; Montaigne: Essays; Locke: Of Civil Government; Rousseau: The Social Contract; Hamilton, Madison et al.: Federalist Papers; Smith: The Wealth of Nations; Marx: Communist Manifesto.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.