My Everyman’s Library collection

foreign books books are great and through this year I've rediscovered the greatness that books hold within them the greatness that stories have uh and the enjoyment that comes with reading these stories now just as there is as many stories as there are that are written and published there are also many different presentations and today I kind of want to nerd out and talk to you about what I think is like a perfect presentation for a book something that I love um and will continue to collect so when I got into reading my big thing was I wanted to read a lot of like foundational works there's probably a lot of really great stuff that's being written like today um but it just fascinates me that there are books that have withstood the test of time um and have in some cases never gone out of print before um and so I'm also a fan of Beginnings so uh where things come from essentially like my favorite book in Lord of the Rings is The Hobbit my favorite book in Narnia is the Magician's Nephew just to kind of give you an idea um because I love like the start of things and so I'm buying all these classic books and now what's really great about reading too is that you can re-read books infinitely you could read one book for the rest of your life and just as soon as you finish it reopen it and you will probably get something new from it um and so when I got into books this year I was thinking you know I really would like something that I can collect and that is great quality uh really nice to hold what is durable um and something that as I am reading uh it is a pleasure to look at and a pleasure to hold um I'm a very I'm a sensory person when it comes to my my touching so having a book that feels great is great uh but having a book that looks good too I feel like just helps kind of draw you into the story even more uh and I think that these kind of books have it down to a t so I'm gonna show off my collection of them and I'm talking about the Every Man's Library edition of books now you can see here I have Moby Dick currently with no jacket on it and that's for two reasons one I'm reading it and the second reason I don't have it the other thing about this uh these is that you can find them used for extremely cheap I got this Edition right here in almost perfect condition uh granted it's a little older so uh it might not be um how they would publish them or produce them now but I still am getting the story in this really nice hard Edition and that's what's important to me so uh I'm gonna use this as kind of a basis to show you just the way that every man tends to lay out their books at least these classical books uh and they have more contemporary literature too uh like modern Classics uh that they publish as well and I own a few of those but when you get something that is as old as Moby Dick you know Victorian era 1800s um it's really cool the features they throw in here so we're gonna crack it open um I guess I should talk about the outside uh this it's cloth bound and it's about it's it's just so velvety all their hard covers are just so pleasing to touch um and so and and they and the the cover colors vary depending on the year um or I guess the century that the books are published in so you'll notice a lot of my books um are this Victorian era uh or 19th century I believe um I'm just having a moment with that literature I guess that's just uh all these great stories uh that's like the time period that's calling to me and then on the end you typically have this little block here that has the author and then this little sun which is a logo and then the title of the work or works because they do collected uh books as well um and then on the back there's nothing obviously and another thing too you see this little guy hanging out here all their books have uh ribbon book markers which I love I think it just helps tie into the kind of classiness and the classic look of this uh of this book like this is something I feel like you would see on your granddad's uh bookshelf uh okay I've spent four minutes uh I haven't even started showing you any of the collection um I originally wanted to post this to Instagram as a real book they limit reels to 15 minutes and I could not make a video under 20. so that is why we are here on my YouTube channel so you open it up you have more of this Every Man's logo and you'll notice the pages are this really nice off-white color um just beautiful the pages are acid free as well I don't know too much of what that means I'm pretty sure that means they don't yellow as quickly over time but also I discuss acid kind of is a scary word so if it's acid free it's good um and since this is an older publication I'm sure newer ones I know newer ones are a little different than this and the way they laid them out but I love this this just looks and and feels so classic to me and over here you have their little saying which I probably should have looked up the work that's from I have before I just forgot um and so yeah the presentation is just beautiful so you have your author introductions as well or introductions by other authors I don't believe um or this one probably was I don't know who it's by and then another cool thing is that they have oh okay there it is larser zith cool name they have the selected bibliography which is cool if you have other these are like other works that you can go and um visit after you read the text or while you're reading the text and then the next cool thing they have is the chronology and this is really cool for these older writers they include this and it tells you the author's life in the literary context and the historical events so you can kind of see what was going on in the author's life and what they were writing or what they were doing and then you can also see like who like what books were coming out or what authors died as well as different historical things which is really interesting to peek through and look through um you know just from time to time I haven't read it like I haven't read um it from like I guess like front to back on here but it is neat to kind of just see like these events and these things that happened uh in the time in which it was written and then you get to the actual book so here it is looming's famous first uh sentence here call me Ishmael as you can see this book is laid out surprisingly well uh sorry if you just heard that my dog just got up off the couch um the text in here like the actual font is a little small um which is fine uh it's not always like that but Moby Dick is a long work and I mean this book is still like I think overs like just under 600 pages uh so they would probably shrink the text a little bit so that way the paperweight is still nice and uh nice and thick in some sense and also so they could fit the whole story in here and not have it be a massive book so you have plenty of margins um on the top and bottom here uh not so much on the side at least in this copy um but yeah it is just laid down laid out so good and even the fonts they choose for their stories they don't carry the same font throughout every single book that they publish but the fonts they do choose I think really represent kind of the mood of the story like this feels like old and typewritery if you will like this feels like an old type and another thing that is really cool is that typically in the backs I don't know about this one [Applause] um okay so this one it doesn't say it but typically it actually tells you a little history about the font that they chose and they typically are correlated with uh in the time in the book was written so yeah the only problem I have with this specific copy of Moby Dick is it doesn't have the extracts now I'll show you real quick here's my pan MacMillan like pocket edition of it uh which is also like really beautiful um it has the extracts uh which is I know they cut them sometimes from publications of Moby Dick but I feel like these are really interesting to go through and they kind of help set the stage of uh Moby Dick the actual whale um and so I think these are important if not maybe crucial to the story um and it is sad that they aren't in there again this is an older one I believe this particular one is from like 96 or something so um I could also be wrong about that so but they probably changed it in newer editions so okay now I've like I've spent holy moly I've spent 10 minutes talking about these um and I haven't even shown you my collection yet so all right there's Moby Dick I guess it doesn't matter I don't have a time limit I guess uh so I can I can go as long as I want here so I'll show you the first one I actually did buy and that is Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy uh which has All the Pretty Horses The Crossing and cities of the Plains phenomenal phenomenal trilogy The Crossing is actually my favorite Cormac McCarthy book and I've read almost everything I have I'm currently finishing sutri right now and then I have child of God in the orchard keeper oh and then the passenger in Stella Maris but as of now the crossing is like definitely my favorite read um and we'll take a look in here too and you can see they kind of change the way they present the um this is more common as we'll go through they changed the way that they lay out this title page here it's and then this is three books in one so you have All the Pretty Horses like I mentioned and then you have let me get to it the crossing um and then you have cities of the plane in there and you can see the text in here is also different as well um I'm not sure it's the same font but it's a little bigger too which is really nice um and so yeah this is just a great great reading material um yeah we'll see I'll show you on here so uh it tells you a little history and then uh this volume is set in typeface Jen uh Jansen and printed on acid free cream row paper with a full sewn cloth binding which is also very important for books and the longevity of books is like sewn bindings and whatnot um and you'll notice the color I'll show you real quick that's because this is contemporary so this is uh or a contemporary classic if you will um not if you will that is what they call them so they have this slightly brighter red coloring to them maybe put that back on alrighty all right then the next one we have is Albert Camus the plague the fall Exile in the kingdom and selected essays um Albert Camus really interests me personally uh and probably a lot of other people but um just some of his ideas are really neat uh he's pretty famous for the quote of like one must imagine Sisyphus happy uh which is cool and so I was intrigued and I found this in a used bookstore uh and reading some Dostoyevsky people on the subreddit pointing out like oh you should check out some commute which I had already sort of planned to but that was just kind of the thing and so finding this and a used bookstore was really cool um I was reading a little bit of the Mythic Sisyphus uh a little while ago uh pretty interesting stuff uh kind of dense philosophy but really really good so far from what I have read and preface I have not read a lot of these books I actually am not buying books for the rest of the year because I have bought all these and again I've bought most of them I have not all of them used except for the Dostoevsky books um so the next up we have uh Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice I I bought this for um more so my wife but I also intend to read it uh Jane Austen like impresses me so much because she was like 20 something she was really young when she started publishing her works and um and she wrote ferociously too from uh from what it says here on her um chronology of you know her life she wrote pretty ferociously and um here hold on we can maybe see exactly when uh when she started yeah so she was she was fairly Young when she first started writing um so that doesn't press me but I do want to read her books uh I also my sister used to love the Pride and Prejudice movies or movie I don't know so I've seen that but I don't remember anything all right the next up we have George eliot's Silas Marner a little short story I found this again in a used bookstore I also wish Every Man's would print this on more of their covers because I think this is so pretty looking and uh if you buy a book use you get this nice detail if you don't get the dust cover so uh not read this one yet uh I have no idea what it's about but I do know that George Eliot wrote Middle March which is a work I um I'm somewhat interested in Reading uh not anytime soon but eventually I would like to get to it um so I thought you know a little short story to kind of get the feel of the author would be cool uh and it was like like eight bucks so all right next up we have arguably the most important book ever written at least the first half of it uh we have the Old Testament and this copy actually came from a library so you can see like the stickers and um you can see on the top I tried to sand away the marker marks I think of blotting out the library's uh like stamp that they put on there did not go super well uh but I also got kind of impatient so I just left it um and this is cool too I'll show you the color of this one it's this beautiful like uh tan color I'm pretty sure all their like religious text come in that color as well uh and one thing I really really love about this Bible is that it is not set up like any other Bible I've seen every Bible I've ever read has like text column here text column here and it kind of gets overwhelming to look at uh but this makes it so much easier to just dive in and take it Page by Page um and just reading these great stories and in such a great translation of the Bible um there's a lot of people who say that the King James version is like the only good translation of the Bible which I'm not too sure uh but extremely poetic the Cornerstone of Western literature um and it's just beautiful to read and if you know anything about me you already know that my bookmark and where I am reading currently is already in Exodus um probably my favorite story in the Bible I probably I mean it is so we have the Old Testament here really really nice and then we have my most unfortunate purchase which is Don Quixote you might be like Brett why is this on why is this like uh unfortunate well because this is the matteau translation which from what I've read is almost unreadable it is a very poor translation of the text um I can't be too upset I paid like five dollars for this and I didn't even think because typically every man is is pretty good at choosing like decent translations you'd think they would choose like the Rutherford or the uh the Grossman translation which is actually I had to go out and buy that for when I read this eventually which will probably be within the year more than likely um so yeah I picked this up and it stinks too like I love that like it just it just fits the theme of the book If you know Don Quixote is um widely regarded as the first modern novel uh and it was penned in the 1600s I think 1605 is when it was first published um I am so excited to read this story because I feel like this is also potentially a Cornerstone for Western literature as we know it today um almost as much as the uh the Old Testament or not the Old Testament the King James Bible ends so really unfortunate probably never read this version but it looks really pretty on the Shelf I mean you got this fat book it's great it's real beautiful all right so the rest of my books now are Russian literature I uh read Dostoyevsky this year and uh I started with Crime and Punishment and it blew me away and there's also something like so interesting about Russia a little side tangent here uh I found out about like the Soviet Union like for real probably like three or four years ago to be honest like I found out just what happened and like how many people died and I was like holy moly how did I not learn about this in school and I touched on it a little bit I read animal farm when I was in Middle School uh which I'm not I don't remember it's been so long I don't remember if it's exactly critiquing Russia or if it's just critiquing communism as a system um but that was like the extent of it and so uh reading Dostoyevsky has just made me so interested in reading more um authors and you know like Chekhov Pushkin tolsto story um all these other great phenomenal writers that come out of Russia so I have quite a stack here and we'll get right into them so we have Lolita by Vladimir bokov I know almost next to nothing about this story um I just know that it's it's pretty disturbing um from what I've heard and I kind of want to keep it that way this might be a read for Halloween uh if it's uh disturbing or around Halloween like the fall time you know which we're getting to real closely here um but yeah I am excited to read this and check it out um and see what that's all about that's all I gotta say about it and then we have the collected stories uh by Alexander Pushkin I've heard Pushkin described as like the Russian Shakespeare if you will and and I oh okay I should preface that not the Russian Shakespeare but uh how Americans typically read Shakespeare in school uh Russians read Pushkin in school that's what I'm trying to say not that he is like Shakespeare uh so I think that's really cool and like I mentioned earlier I like getting to like the root of things so if I'm going to start reading Russian literature I kind of want to see like what helped paved later Russian literature and so here's a his short stories uh I've not dip my toes into this one yet I will eventually when I'm in the mood I haven't read any short story books yet um unfortunately but I mean I just got into reading this year uh I got back into reading this year so it is uh it is on my to be read list I will visit it soon I'll cut there um my dog wanted his dinner so if you hear him chewing I apologize but also he is just well fed so the next book we have is notes from a dead house by Dostoyevsky this is the only book this year that I did not finish and um I'm hesitant to return to it because it has been like a month since I put it down so I don't remember a whole lot um I remember like bits and pieces but you know I mean I've read other books since then that have kind of taken over my my uh my brain my my little capacity brain so uh but I will plan I will uh revisit this potentially within the year um and so uh sorry I should say I didn't stop reading it because it was boring I just it wasn't I wasn't ready for it but I put this down to read a different Dostoevsky novel um so another cool thing about this they probably do this with other translated works as well I actually don't know if it's in here yeah yeah okay so uh this is based on the translations but it is nice to have them in here so all dostoyevsky's books are in the pnv translations the uh what is it called peever and volochinski I'm pretty sure is how you say that and they have all these notes which are really handy to have um I feel like most the time I don't really need to reference them because I can kind of understand what's being said um but sometimes they mention historical things or they mention um other things from other works and you get hung up and it's cool to have these notes back here that you can hop back to and they're numbered and um placed within the text as well so it's really cool to be able to hop back here while you're reading and um get kind of a better idea of what is being talked about that house then we have my favorite read of the year Crime and Punishment gosh I like I can't I just uh I already want to reread it like so so bad and I could it's the thing but I have so many other works that I want to get through too um oh I thought I thought it was a little speck um but yeah Crime and Punishment it's just what a good book uh it is just gripping gripping the whole story just as non-stop grip on your heart and your mind um and your feelings too so again really beautifully set up here um I guess I haven't really been showing you too much the uh the text but yeah this kind of feels like it's uh in the same vein as what I said about Moby Dick it feels like it fits so actually skip back here real quick and see um okay this one doesn't tell you the tech the the type they used either some of them do and some of them don't which is kind of kind of odd um but yeah just gosh great book really good book and uh the reason reading this first might be the reason I had a hard time with the next Dostoevsky book that I've read and just recently finished um because this book is so fast paced and I guess it is kind of the only Dostoyevsky book that is fast paced from what I've read online um so I mean if you're planning to get an adult Dostoyevsky word of advice if you read this don't expect every single book of his to feel as fast-paced as this one next one I have is the idiot so um this book was kind of a struggle for me and I think I went into it uh with one the fact the thought that like maybe this would be like as fast-paced as Crime and Punishment and it's not it's relatively slow um and it's something you have to appreciate Dostoevsky for he's really good at building up the tension and so I also did not go into this prepared I think and I I lost track at some points and some like just I would say around like 400 or so pages in I kind of just wanted it to be done but as I finished it something didn't sit right in my heart so then I started thinking about it and I started researching about it that's just another thing to be grateful for that we live in such a time where uh these old texts have been uh like deciphered and and there are plenty of talks and writings online that are freely available for you to help you engage more with these with these uh great books and this great conversation um my favorite character in this book is ipalit I think I gosh I loved him I loved everything he had to say Michigan is awesome as well I loved Michigan um my only problem maybe with this story not that a critique matters this book is like almost 200 years old um is that Michigan did not talk enough I loved when he would go on his little Rants and uh get his little fits um not the seizure fits but you know and he just when he would just go on and on and on about a topic that was when it would really pull me back in um but I learned from this book what I need to do with other Dostoevsky books and I will talk about that a little later so yeah the idiot and next up we have demons which is goodness I I am so drawn to this book everything I hear about it I just it like pulls me in however I am intimidated by it because I've heard that it is very confusing um and it's confusing for a while before things start to really click together for you um and I just am like you know I will eventually get over this intimidation and I'll dive in and maybe I'll just plot power through it you know and if I don't understand a whole lot then I will then go and research things um I don't like doing it typically beforehand because if I am able to I would like to draw some of my own conclusions and then see how that goes against either what other people have said or what other people have uh said and how I can add that to my understanding of the text and so yeah I just I'm so excited this is probably his darkest Works uh that he has written and it predates the Soviet Union by like a hundred years or something and from what I understand it kind of like weighs out the crown work for what actually happens in Russia um in one way or another so I am incredibly excited to read this eventually however my newest read is the brothers karamazov um that was a little cringe but I don't care um I originally wanted to read all of like dostoevsky's really big Works before I dove into this one because one it says magnum opus and two he wrote this at the end of his life and a lot of authors when they kind of like Dostoevsky died pretty young he was only I think in his 60s but I think everyone kind of gets an inkling for when their time has come if you will and so this kind of combines like every talking point from his older books and one way or another and kind of just puts them all in here um so I actually started reading this one I think yesterday yeah yesterday I started reading it I picked it up I was just craving it I was craving Dostoyevsky again another example where this is a long book so they cut down on the text uh or the font I should say or not the font yeah the actual text and make it small and I mean this book is still like 800 Pages yeah or yeah just under 800 Pages there 776 um and I am so excited to dive in and what I mentioned that I learned from the idiot that I took into this book was having a little notebook um I don't you can see I don't really write or uh write anything in my books and so and I don't want to not in here at least and I know that's like really good but I just never really do in general I don't think of it but when you're reading uh these this Russian literature uh you can get lost with the names because they have um different names and different like short uh versions of the names and I actually can find it in here that kind of it's like a name guide if you will so this will tell you like the characters and then all these little sub names for them I don't remember exactly what these are called it probably mentions that I've been here um but it is good like this is at the front of the book so you can reference it whenever but I find it easier to take the names and write them down in here and writing it with the hand actually I feel like I don't feel like it's it's like science uh it kind of helps solidify things in your brain more so you um will just remember it when it comes up later or again if you don't you can reference back here um so you can write down their names and like some of those like nicknames if you will I don't know the proper name I'm sorry and then just like some characteristics about the the character in in question and you just do it as they kind of come along too um I think this is why I didn't enjoy the idiots because at times I was very lost in who was talking and uh what person was talking and so um thought this would probably be a good idea for me alrighty well that's my collection I'm sorry this video is so long I just I am passionate about things and I geek out and um if you do uh want to start collecting these again check the use section check your local used bookstore if you have one or one that's maybe a couple towns away uh and see what they have because they offer a lot of really good Publications um and authors and arrays of literature and things for you to read and these are durable books that are beautiful and just oh just so nice and so good to feel so okay I love you I hope you enjoyed this video

Channel: Brent Stryker Talks a Lot

Views: 17,437

Keywords: Books, Booktok, Bookish, Classic literature, Dostoevsky, Book haul, Reading, Great literature, Everyman’s Library

Id: 7_5_mqpM49U

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2023