Hefty Book Meme

Eric Scheske at The Daily Eudemon, and blogfather of Chesterton & Friends, has created a hefty book meme and has tagged me for it. Mr. Thumos has cleverly called it the "Textual Defense Initiative (TDI)."

1. Name your three biggest non-reference books (excluding the Bible and text books).

2. Name your three biggest reference books.

3. Tag three others.

By “biggest,” we’re not looking for number of words. We’re looking for weight. Heft. Something you’d drop on invaders while defending a castle.

I own few hefty books. To stop an intruder I would push over a bookshelf.

non-reference:

Laszlo Polgar. Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. In my collection this wins the Fewest Words award as well as Most Heft.

The Riverside Shakespeare.

Cervantes. Don Quixote. An English translation with lots of commentary. Monty Python of the early 1600s.

Honorable Mention (because they are loved by my children and are reasonably thick): Bill Bennett (ed.). Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass. These are great books to read aloud after dinner to children ages 2 to 102.

reference:

Orchard, Bernard et al. (eds.). A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. Published by Nelson and Sons in 1951. I found my copy via www.abebooks.com. The bookplate shows that it was previously owned by a nunnery in California. Hopefully they tossed it because they already had plenty of other copies on hand.

Frederick Copleston. History of Philosophy, Book 1 (Vol 1-3).

I, too, had a "Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary" ... and it was huge. Guests would gasp when they saw it. But after several words could not be found in it, but only in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the "Webster's" "Unabridged" was tossed into the trash.

tag three others:

atheling2 at The Pugil Stick
Robert Pearson at New Victorian
Michael Vooris at Thursday