| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jay Satterfield. The World's Best Book: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 240. $29.95.

The Modern Library was America's most important series of reprinted books in the first half of the twentieth century. Created in 1917, the series offered affordably priced, well-produced editions of classic literature together with the best of contemporary writing. It combined aggressive marketing with a carefully chosen list that grew from a dozen initial titles, including Treasure Island and Thus Spake Zarathustra to over two hundred, ranging from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud and from The Iliad to Ulysses. At its peak success in the 1920s and 1930s, profits from the series helped to finance the founding of Random House, and its vast reach marked a milestone in the popularizing of serious literature.

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