The Collections

Sacred texts spanning a millennium — the books that shaped Western moral imagination.

The scene that started it all. Epic, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy — all invented here.

Latin literature that absorbed, transformed, and transmitted Greek culture across an empire.

A thousand years shaped by faith and feudalism, and the slow recovery of classical learning.

The rediscovery of antiquity, the invention of print, and an explosion of vernacular literature.

The single largest gravitational force in English literature — tragedies, comedies, histories, sonnets.

Non-epic verse — lyric, metaphysical, devotional, satirical — carved out and gathered together.

Reason, satire, and the birth of the modern novel. Literature becomes a tool for social criticism.

The turn toward emotion, imagination, and the self — and the novel set loose across Europe.

The half-century when the novel became the central form on three continents — Dickens to Tolstoy.

The old forms shatter. Freud opens the century, the Great War breaks it in half, 1922 is the annus mirabilis.

Breadlines, dictators rising, the war and its witnesses — and the verdict delivered in 1949.

The bomb has dropped and the novel asks what's left — alienated kids, the absurd, the Boom detonating in 1967.

The novel goes global and self-aware. The designated growth room.