20109327.0430

I have noted, I believe, having a set of books kept in the living room that are fancier printings, bound in colored leather and with gilt- or silver-edged pages (for the most part), or slipcovered in hardback collectors' editions of works held elsewhere in the house in working copies, sometimes in multiple translations. They serve as celebrations of the printer's arts as well as of the writer's, editor's, and translator's, to be sure; they also serve as a reminder to those who visit that the household is one that prizes literacy. It is probably not necessary; few, if any, visit who do not know the occupants, and it defies understanding that those who know me or my wife would not realize that we value the written word, perhaps more highly than we ought to do. We met in an English graduate degree program, after all, and both pursued doctorates in the arts of the book (because that is the "liberal" in "liberal arts," "having to do with the book," though it is not for nothing that "book" and "free" share a term).
I have thought, though I do not know that I have noted, that the series of such things from which we draw most of our examples is itself a re-creation or re-inscription of a literary canon, though perhaps a different one than would have been taught prior to the culture wars in US academe. Yes, such things as Plato's Republic are included, but so is Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. Shakespeare is, of course, amid the series (though, with several other copies floating around the house, we've not opted to buy it), as is the Bible (ibid., including the Oxford UP Quatercentenary Authorized Version on the fancy-book shelf), but so are Lovecraft's works. So that much is to the good; the series editors look a bit further afield than the putatively standard works the Victorians would recognize, expanding the field of what might be considered "standard" readings.
At the same time, the works represented by the series skew heavily white and male. A large part of that has to do with the fact that many of the works presented in the series are those the Victorians might have recognized as standards; though the series does some work to move outside such a set, it does not leave that set aside as it does so. Too, there are and remain socioeconomic forces that work against the inclusion of works by women and persons of color; there is still less economic room for people who aren't middle- to upper-class white guys to spend their time writing than for women to do so, or people of color, or even working-class folk of whatever other demographic. Consequently, there is relatively less writing by those groups, and concomitantly, less chance for such writing to be recognized as being the kind of writing that lends itself to enshrinement as collectible. And that is problematic.
There is this, too: licensing the "fancy" editions has its own legal entanglements. While many of the "classic" texts are in public domain and may therefore be used with relative impunity, the emergent greater works--insofar as such things can still be discussed or described--remain under copyright, and not all authors or their agents are willing to have those works taken up in such series as serves for living room decoration for my family. I do what I can to get the authorized parallels to them, or I have done, but there are not always such to be found...