Education: Packets for Princetonians

Princeton University was playing Santa Claus last week to its 1,300 students who left the campus to join the U.S. Armed Forces. To each went the offer of a packet of three books (free), to be chosen from a list of 70. Princeton informed its servicemen that the books were “inexpensive editions, chosen for their compactness . . . not . . . Princeton’s ‘three-inch shelf’ of the ‘world’s best authors.’ Some . . . hardly wear a cap and gown. But we think there is good reading, as well as entertainment, among them.”

Among the 70 titles: Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, e. e. cummings’ The Enormous Room, Don Quixote, The Education of Henry Adams, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Pilgrim’s Progress, Lewis Carroll’s Collected Stories, The Origin of Species, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Fourteen Great Detective Stories, Anatole France’s Penguin Island, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Odyssey, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Ring Lardner’s Collected Short Stories, The Philosophy of Plato, Alfred North Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics. Not included: the Bible (“We assume you have … or … can easily acquire one”).