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Secondary sourceBook1909

Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books

Charles W. Eliot (editor); Francis Bacon (contributor) · 1909

A Harvard Classics anthology of prefaces and prologues to famous books, edited by Charles W. Eliot. Francis Bacon contributed one preface, but only part of the volume is his.

Shows Bacon as one contributor to a later anthology, where his preface appears among prefaces by other writers.

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Full text (public-domain edition)

About this source

What it is

This is a volume in the Harvard Classics series, edited by Charles W. Eliot and published in New York by P.F. Collier and Son in 1909. It gathers prefaces and prologues written for famous books, with introductions and notes. Francis Bacon contributed one preface, but only part of the book is his. The copy in this archive is a digital reproduction of the volume.

Why it matters

Prefaces were where authors explained their aims to readers. Placing many of them side by side shows how writers presented their work across different centuries. The contents include prologues by William Caxton, a dedication of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, and a dedication to Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, alongside Bacon's contribution. Students can compare how each writer spoke to the reader.

Look closer

  • Who was each preface written for, and what does the writer promise the reader?
  • How does Bacon's preface present his purpose compared with the other writers in the volume?
  • What does this anthology leave out, given that only part of the book is by Bacon?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Francis Bacon and Nicolaus Copernicus on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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