Archive.org provides all 51 volumes of The Harvard Classics anthology in many formats for free download on their servers. Unfortunately, the current page listing all of these volumes is a little disorganised, so to help you easily locate and download the files you need, I have collected all of the links on a single page.

You will find volumes organised numerically with a short description of the text and download links for the PDF, MOBI, ePub and plain text files.

Photo by mjsawyer, via Flickr

Via Hatwoman

While browsing for photos of the Harvard Classics anthology, I came across this amazing advertisement from a copy of Life Magazine published in 1922. What an amazing ad!

I can't help wondering if the "booklet" described is in fact the same reading guide we're using as the basis for the HC365 project...

To help ensure the eBooks and website are ready for a 2014 launch, I've decided to develop a Kickstarter project.

I'm aiming to raise £250 which will help cover some of the costs for this project, and in return guarantee that all supporters will receive an advance copy of the eBook (with some other great rewards yet to be announced).

Watch this space for news of the project launch - and my eternal thanks in advance to any and all who pledge their support!

I'm now just over a quarter of the way through transcribing all of the reading material outlined in Eliot's reading guide for The Harvard Classics, having just finished January through March.

So far, that's over 600 A4 pages, approximately 200 per month or between 5 and 10 per day. I dread to think how my poor old laptop will cope with the memory required to put all of the months together in one huge document, or how many pages this will transform into once I ready it for PDF, Kindle and ePub formats!

But despite all of this, I can honestly say I haven't enjoyed a project so much in years! I simply hope I am able to find the time to get everything together and publish in plenty of time for the start of 2014.

If you're a fan of the "For Dummies" series of books, or would just like to know a bit about a whole lot of things, here's a great free Kindle book for you.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies celebrates 20 years of the For Dummies series with 20 chapters covering a vast rage of subjects from DOS through to Canadian History, guitar and even puppies! Best of all, it's currently free to download for Kindle!

In celebration of National Children's Book Week, Booktrust has compiled a list of the 100 best children's books to read by the age of 14.

The exciting 100 combines an eclectic mix of traditional classics and modern greats that we believe are must-reads to fire children’s imaginations and turn them into life-long readers. The cut-off age of 14 was chosen as beyond that, children tend to progress to more adult literature.

The books are divided into age-based categories, with titles ranging from The Cat in the Hat to The Hobbit and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.For the full list of books on one page, check out this page on Metro or visit the link below to view by age category and vote for your favourites.

The original full-length first volume of The Harvard Classics collection is available for download in many formats from Archive.org. Here I have provided links to the most popular formats for your convenience.

Volume 1 includes:

• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Journal of John Woolman
• Fruits of Solitude by William Penn

Anton Chekhov, author of Chameleon

A recent study published in Science Magazine suggests that reading literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or non-fiction) can temporarily improve your emotional intelligence.

Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.

Participants reading literary fiction scored better on tests measuring empathy, social and emotional intelligence than those reading pop-fiction, non-fiction or nothing at all. Some showed improvement after reading for just a few minutes!

When I initially decided to write Harvard Classics 365, I didn't actually realise how great a task this would be.

Each of the daily readings spans 4-5 (occasionally 6) A4 pages in my word processor. Multiply this by 365, and we're talking about a book with several thousand pages, particularly when you realise this will be published for reading on tablet-style devices...

But you know what? I'm really enjoying this project!