The Story of Civilization (11 volume set)

Complete 11 volume set in very good condition. All 11 volumes have dust jackets, now in new removable protective covers; most dust jackets have scuffs, small closed tears and chips; the Volume 1 dust jacket has a dampstain to the spine at the bottom. Volume 6 has prior owner's name on dust jacket. Pages are clean and unmarked, with red top edges; some volumes have old book smell. Brick red cloth covered boards, with illustrated end papers (maps). Massively illustrated, with bibliographies, indexes, and notes. Simon and Schuster / Book-of-the-Month Club hard covers with dust jackets. ISBN: 9781567310238, 8vo (9.5" x 6.5") Please note, due to size and weight will ship media mail with signature confirmation. Sorry, no expedited or International orders.


The Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader. The series was written over a span of more than four decades. It totals four million words across nearly 10,000 pages. Durant said his purpose in writing the series was not to create a definitive scholarly production but to make a large amount of information accessible and comprehensible to the educated public in the form of a comprehensive ""composite history."" Given the massive undertaking in creating 11 volumes over 50 years, errors and incompleteness were inevitable by Durant's own reckoning; but no other historical survey matches let alone exceeds the breadth and depth of his project, he claimed. Volume 10 won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.