Plato Five Great Dialogues, Classics Club, Walter J. Black, Linen and Crimson, c. 1942–1950

The Piece

Plato's Five Great Dialogues in the Classics Club edition of 1942, published by Walter J. Black of New York and bound in the club's natural linen cloth, the front board carrying the red oval Classics Club monogram and the spine banded in crimson and black with the title and author lettered in gilt between rules of Greek key and leaf ornament. The top edge is stained a warm orange, the contrast that gives the book its color on a shelf. Inside, the Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium and Republic in the Benjamin Jowett translation, edited with an introduction by Louise Ropes Loomis, with a frontispiece of a charioteer driving four horses adapted from a Greek vase in the Yale University Art Gallery and a decoration before the Symposium from the same source. A compact octavo of about five hundred pages, cleanly printed on cream paper.

Condition is very good: the linen bright and unspotted, the spine labels unfaded, the gilt legible, the top stain even, the binding square and tight, the pages clean with mild toning at the edges and no inscriptions, foxing or tears found. Issued without a dust jacket in the club's usual way.

History & Provenance

Walter J. Black was the great American publisher of books by mail. He began in the 1920s selling sets of Conan Doyle and Dumas through newspaper coupons, built the Detective Book Club in 1942, and in 1941 founded the Classics Club, which promised its subscribers the great books of the Western world, newly edited, handsomely bound and delivered to the door for a few dollars a volume. The club's editor was Louise Ropes Loomis, a professor of history at Wells College and a translator of Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, who chose the texts, wrote the introductions and gave the series its scholarly spine, and its first titles, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Bacon, Emerson, Thoreau, went out in this natural linen binding with the red monogram, a design that made the Classics Club shelf one of the most recognizable in the American home of the 1940s and 1950s. Plato's Five Great Dialogues, copyright 1942, was among the earliest volumes and the one most often read, the Apology and the Republic having been the entry to philosophy for a generation of readers who came to Plato by mail.

The translation is Jowett's, the Oxford version of 1871 that made Plato an English classic, lightly edited by Loomis for the modern reader. The dating rests on the imprint rather than style alone: the copyright page dated 1942 and the first-pattern linen binding with the red oval monogram place the book in the opening years of the club, before the series changed to its later cloth, and it is dated c. 1942–1950.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Natural linen with a flash of crimson at the spine is one of the most useful books a shelf can hold: it reads as neutral from across the room and as considered up close, and it stacks with the scarlet and the dark green cloth of the same decade as if the three were bound for each other. It belongs on a nightstand, a desk, a mantel under a small bronze or a bookcase in a study, a cottage or a reading room, and it is Plato, so it can be opened. A natural gift for a student, a teacher, a reader of philosophy or a collector of the Classics Club in its first binding. For a shop or designer client it is the period linen hardcover with a serious title that styles a bookcase in any palette and sells on the spine.