About 5ft shelf

In 1909 Dr Eliot, then President of Harvard University, claimed a liberal education could be achieved by reading a collection of books that would total no more than 5ft in width. A local publisher challenged him to name them and he responded with what became known as the Harvard Classics.

Shifting forward 100 years and into the age of the internet, we're trying to find out what the modern equivalent would be.  A lot has happened in the last century and we felt it would be impossible to get a fair representation of people’s interests without introducing two quintessential formats for modern living—music albums and movies.

Coincidentally 3 years earlier, and completely independently, Francis Galton realised the wisdom of the crowd when visiting a livestock fair. An ox was on display at the fair and the villagers were invited to guess the animals weight. Nearly 800 entered the competition and to his surprise Galton found not only was the average of all the guesses more accurate than any single person, it was better than the independent livestock experts (and only 1 pound from the actual ox's weight).

5ft Shelf blends the concept of a must read shelf with that of the crowd-decision, modernises it and makes it available to the world for free via the Internet. As well as trying to discover the most popular and influential books, music and film of our time, 5ft Shelf also helps visitors discover new items. The Ultimate and mini-shelves provide a snapshot of the most popular items overall and under a given topic, the news feed and user reviews provide a rich social interaction around the inbuilt network and personalised recommendations are regularly created and updated for registered users.

To contribute in our quest to find a modern equivalent of the Harvard Classics signup and create a shelf of your favorites. Any items you add will count towards the ultimate and mini-shelf calculations and we'll even make personalised recommendations on what to read/watch/listen to next based on the items you add.

As a site we aim to make discovering new books, albums and movies both a pleasure and easy. As time goes on we hope to add to our feature set to provide you with more ways to do this. If you any thoughts or questions in the meantime then please do get in contact