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.

Rather than use a single authoritative source for the modern shelf, we've taken the opposite approach by allowing users to create their own shelf. We then combine all these shelves to find the most popular items and create our top 5ft shelf ("the ultimate shelf").

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.

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