A collection of 30 great books based on Hillsdale’s core literature classes is now for sale at the college’s online store.
“All Great Books Collection titles were selected in partnership with the college’s English department,” the college said in a Sept. 13 press release. “The editions offered include best-in-class commentary and translation as well as timeless lessons concerning human nature, virtue, self-government, and liberty.”
The collection includes works from authors such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. They are available for purchase at shop.hillsdale.edu.
Director of E-commerce John Quint ’09 said the shop was mainly intended for students enrolled in free online courses.
“The new online store is largely in service to the online learning participants,” Quint said. “We’re actually selling books related to the courses that they’re taking.”
Doug Banbury, vice president for admissions and business development, said the e-commerce team has worked hard to make the site accessible.
“A lot of our online students don’t want to order anything on Amazon or aren’t as familiar with the internet,” Banbury said. “So we’re designing the site in a way that is very-user friendly to people of all technology capabilities.”
The online shop launched in April 2021. Since the addition of the Great Books Collection, more than 100 products are for sale, including “The Churchill Project” books, Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars,” and other texts that accompany the online courses.
“My goal as the director of e-commerce is just to figure out how we can distribute and make a wide accessible sales channel available to the general public,” Quint said.
Professor of English Justin Jackson said he hopes the accessibility of the collection will have the ability to touch many people’s lives.
“We wanted friends of the college to be able to see what our students read in their great books classes,” Jackson said. “I hope they encounter the same joy that we and our students do when grappling with life’s big questions.
After entering into these works, even for the first time, one is never really the same.”
The 30 titles in the collection include “The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri, “Confessions” by Saint Augustine, “Pride & Prejudice” by Jane Austen, the book of “Genesis,” “The Fall” by Albert Camus, “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” “Notes from Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot,” “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “Faust” by Goethe, “Young Goodman Brown & Other Short Stories” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” by Homer, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller, “Paradise Lost” by John Milton, “Metamorphoses” by Ovid, “Selections from The Canzoniere” by Petrarch, “Iphigenia, Phaedra and Athaliah” by Jean Racine, “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Hamlet” and “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy, “Candide” by Voltaire, and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”